


Don't Let The Water Drag You Down

by soulshrapnel



Series: oh my god they were co-emperors [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Cave diving, Emperor Vader, Gen, Jedi Temple shenanigans, More tags to be added, Please Do Not Tell Darth Vader You Are His Daughter, long slow painful redemption arc, reconciliation is hard actually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28572345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulshrapnel/pseuds/soulshrapnel
Summary: Luke Skywalker, newly an Imperial Prince, thinks he's making good progress at redeeming his father. But figuring out how to prince correctly is hard. Luke thinks a change of scenery will help him clear his head, and Anakin knows just the place - his mother's memorial on Naboo, with maybe a side trip to some interesting Jedi ruins he's heard about.Leia Organa, the Rebel Alliance's last hope, is busily training up to become a Jedi. But her anger at the Emperors, and at Luke for joining them, is getting the better of her. Her mentor thinks a journey to some old Jedi ruins would help Leia gain some perspective, and she knows just the place...Leia didn't expect to run into her father and brother again so soon. Luke didn't expect to have to explain himself to Leia's face. But they're all going to have to sort out their differences quickly, because these Jedi ruins are more than they seem - and what their half-sunken structure hides might just be the key to the Skywalker family's future.
Relationships: Ahsoka Tano & Darth Vader, Leia Organa & Darth Vader, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker, Luke Skywalker & Darth Vader
Series: oh my god they were co-emperors [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1845532
Comments: 116
Kudos: 113





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many, _many_ shout-outs to Micelle for helping me troubleshoot & brainstorm WTF was going on with this story. My initial plan was "a bunch of Luke and Vader fluff" but it just wasn't working for me without an external conflict. Hopefully this external conflict is gonna be fun now, though.
> 
> As I mentioned in the notes to "The Madness of Emperor Tarkin," I plan to write both these stories sorta concurrently, as the mood strikes me, like a pair of interconnected Disney+ series. They're about completely different things, and you won't have to have read one to understand the other.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Luke appears publicly as an Imperial Prince for the first time.

Luke looked down apprehensively from the top of the palace steps as Imperial citizens gathered below him - troopers and officers at attention in their tidy squares, and beyond them, a more colorful crowd of ordinary Coruscant people. Recording droids swooped in long arcs overhead. This was Luke's first public appearance as an Imperial Prince. The _real_ announcement - a press release saying Emperor Vader had found his long-lost son - had gone out days ago. But the galaxy needed to see him. They needed to hear him speak.

He was dressed for the occasion. For the past few weeks, in an attempt to work out _how to prince,_ Luke had been spending a lot of time studying old holos of his mother. He'd spent long afternoons flopped down with a portable holo player in his sumptuous quarters, watching how poised she had been, how eloquent and measured in her speech, how incredibly elaborate her clothes were. Luke didn't know how good he'd ever be at looking poised or talking eloquently, but clothes were easy. All he'd had to do was talk to the Imperial tailors. Give them a vague sense of what he was looking for, and they'd do the rest.

What he wore now was a formal suit with a jacket, tunic, trousers, and boots, the same as most Imperial formal clothes, but their design was just about as far removed from Imperial military style as Luke could manage. The whole outfit was a delicate shade of off-white, ruched and embroidered in elaborate patterns and cut to flatter his scrawny nineteen-year-old figure. The boots were the same pale shade as the other clothes, and a lacy, delicate cape fell from his shoulders to his waist, twisting in the breeze. Only the very highest levels of Coruscant, Luke had learned, got breezes like this. Down lower, the air only moved because it was pumped around by industrial air-circulation machines, as vital to the planet-city's survival as water and electrical mains.

He'd let the palace servants style his hair and even put makeup on him. Nothing too wild, just some stuff to even out his skin tone for the cameras and to make his features bold enough for the distant crowds. Padmé Amidala had painted her face to look unrecognizable while she was queen, and Luke had been tempted to ask for that, to try to separate Prince Luke's official face from the face that his friends knew. But nobody did things that way around here. He'd made this choice to join his father in the Empire. He should own it.

His father - still Emperor Vader to the public, although he had started using his old name again in private - stood a little bit behind him. In front of them there was a minor functionary speaking to the crowd, saying something to introduce him to everyone, but Luke was too nervous to pay attention to the words. He only ran the words of his prepared speech over and over again in his mind and tried to take deep breaths, until the functionary stepped aside and his father beckoned him forward, right to the lip of the great staircase, where the cameras picked up his face and splashed it, a hundred times its real size, onto every holoscreen in the vicinity.

His stomach did a small flip. Oh, Force, how many people was this? Thousands? Add the number who were watching the live feed from other planets and it must be millions, billions...

He cleared his throat.

"My name is Luke Skywalker," he said. "Several weeks ago, I found out that Emperor Vader was my father. Before that, I was just someone who'd grown up on a farm, like any of you. My mother died not long before I was born My father never knew I'd survived. I was hidden from him, because people fear my father's power. People fear what he represents. I was taught that fear, too, but now I know I was wrong."

He had practiced this speech in the mirror. He tried to say the words the way Padmé Amidala in those old holovids would have said them, poised and clear and slow, and yet somehow so warm. But mostly he thought he looked wooden. A droid reciting lines, nothing in its face daring to move at all. Up here, in front of the crowd with his stomach in knots, he had that feeling worse than ever.

The words of the speech weren't all his, which made it worse. Mostly they were from a draft written by one of Emperor Tarkin's speechwriters. Then he and the two Emperors had had a long, tense meeting where they edited and re-edited every line until all three of them were satisfied.

It was a delicate situation. Until a few weeks ago, Luke had been a Rebel. He'd blown up the Death Star, and the future Emperor Tarkin had almost been aboard. Deep down, Luke still thought the Rebels were better people than the Empire. But he'd joined his father anyway, in exchange for a truce between the Empire and the Rebels. He'd been put in a position where he didn't have many choices, and he'd made the ones he could.

His father had suggested hiding the fact that Luke was a Rebel. Just not mentioning it in public at all. But both Tarkin and the speechwriter had known better. The Rebels already knew who Luke was, and they would broadcast the truth soon enough. So the Empire had to get out in front of it.

 _I'm not saying that,_ Luke had exclaimed so many times, blanching at scripted lines that called his friends terrorists or traitors or a lost cause. They were still his friends.

Tarkin had pressed his fingertips to his temples in exasperation. Since the day Luke arrived at the palace, Tarkin had begun to look unhappy and tired, pessimistic about what Luke's presence meant for the Empire but resigned to the fact that Luke's father would not let him go.

 _It is a political necessity,_ Tarkin had tried to explain. _Have you renounced the Rebellion or haven't you? The public won't accept you unless you can reassure them that your thinking is in line-_

 _He is not saying it,_ Luke's father said, looming and menacing.

Luke's father had only recently decided that he wanted to be called Anakin again. He was not exactly returning to the Light Side, but he didn't want his life to keep revolving around murder, either. The result was something hesitant and awkward, the midpoint of a transition. He was Anakin in private, tender and protective with his son. He was still Emperor Vader in the public eye, wrapped in black armor and a dark mystique.

Emperor Vader loomed beside Luke now on that big staircase in front of the palace. His presence, silently approving, was what gave weight to Luke's words.

"Because I was taught to fear," said Luke, "I once fought with the Rebel Alliance. But that was a path that only prolonged the conflict and led to the loss of more lives. I regret that loss, and I renounce the Rebel cause."

He pretended his face was covered in white paint, like a queen's, unreadable. His friends would watch this speech, he knew. Han and Leia and Chewie and Artoo and so many other people he loved. He didn't want to imagine their faces.

"What I want more than anything is peace," he continued. "Fear and conflict took my father from me. I want that to be over now. In honor of having found me, the Emperors have made an offer of peace to the Rebels. If they lay down their arms and cease to threaten the rest of the galaxy, then in the new Rebel Alliance Autonomus Sector, they will be allowed to govern themselves as they see fit."

This wasn't exactly news - the nets had been buzzing with it for weeks - but they'd all agreed it was important for Luke to define his place in this story, to publicly associate himself with the truce, so that both stories made sense.

It was just too bad that the speech wasn't all the way true. Luke hadn't wanted to stay here at first. He'd given in, not because he thought the Rebellion was wrong, but because his father needed him; he'd asked for the truce because it was a bare minimum, because he _couldn't_ stay with the people who were killing his friends. But Luke couldn't tell that story in a speech to people who were loyal to the Empire. And even though they'd settled on an official story that didn't call his friends evil - just misguided or afraid or whatever - it was still a lie that stuck in his throat.

"I am proud to be a member of Emperor Vader's family," Luke continued, feeling more wooden and ill than ever. "And I am proud to serve the Empire as a Prince. I vow to use my position here to continue the cause of peace. The Empire has always promised order and peace, and peace doesn't only mean destroying your enemies. Sometimes it means reaching out to the people you thought were your enemies and finding a common ground. Learning about my father taught me that."

These last three sentences were Luke's. He'd added them late in the process, when none of the Imperial speechwriters' conclusions to his speech felt quite right. They had made Emperor Tarkin's pallid face turn several alarming shades of purple and green. Luke had been sure he wasn't going to get away with them, but then Anakin and Tarkin had shared a long, strange look, and Tarkin had folded. He'd limited himself to correcting a few grammatical errors and some muttering about how, if the Skywalkers were going to be the death of him, they might as well get it over with. Then he'd excused himself.

There was something in Tarkin's mind lately that made Luke uneasy - besides just the usual evil. Ever since Anakin forced him to go through with the truce, something about him had felt a little strange, a little broken. Luke kept wanting to ask about it, and something deeper down kept stopping him. He was fairly sure he didn't really want to know.

"My first official act as Prince," said Luke, "in that spirit of reconciliation, will be to oversee the construction of a memorial for the Jedi Order."

There wasn't much more to the speech after that, just some summing-up. Luke's stomach was flipping around even more and worse than before. He couldn't tell, as he looked down at those crowds, what they thought of him - he could feel them in the Force, but only as a sort of inchoate mass of noise. He wasn't even sure what he _wanted_ them to think.

Afterwards, he walked back into the palace with slow, princely dignity, imitating what he'd seen of his mother's gait. He walked all the way to the fresher, knelt down carefully there, and threw up.

*

It turned out that, when you were an Imperial Prince, you could barricade yourself in your room and sulk all evening and everyone else would just roll with it. A droid came by at one point to give him dinner - toast and a bland kind of fruit, designed to be easy on the stomach, since Luke appeared not to be feeling well. Anakin made hesitant mental contact, but since Luke wasn't harming himself or others, his father was content to give him space. Anakin of all people understood sulking.

When he woke up in the morning, in the soft blue-and-green-and-black extravagance of his palace bed, looking up at the black ceiling with little shards of transparisteel glinting in it like stars, he felt better. The ceremony was something he'd known he had to do, and now it was over.

He'd been assigned a protocol droid at some point, a little silver one with a feminine voice, to guide him through palace procedures and remind him of his schedule. Her name was B-3Q. She had a lot less personality than Threepio. There was a breakfast nook in one of the palace's highest levels, just a little room perched up there with a view of a verdant courtyard below, and Luke let B-3Q guide him there for a morning meal with his father.

Anakin had taken to eating breakfast like this with Luke about half the time. The rest of the time, he was either visiting Mustafar or spending his mornings with Tarkin, and Luke did his own thing. Dinner was usually shared the three of them, but that was always fraught – Luke still didn’t like Tarkin very much, and the feeling was mutual – so for breakfasts and lunches, by unspoken mutual agreement, they were separate, with Anakin meandering between them.

Anakin didn’t actually _eat,_ at these breakfasts and lunches – his face was always covered with that mask, and he mostly just sat there and made small talk with Luke while Luke ate. Whatever cyborg thing Anakin did to nourish himself, it was private, and Luke hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to ask.

He did look different, though, in these private moments. Now that he wasn’t calling himself Vader in private, Anakin had started to experiment with not putting all of his suit on. He was still covered from head to toe; he still wore his heavy boots and thick gloves, and a strange rigid collar, as well as the mask, which made its usual breathing sound. He still had the indicator panels that monitored his vital signs. But the shoulder armor and cape weren’t there this morning, and neither were several other armor plates – only the quilting of black fabric beneath them remained. And he’d taken off the heavy outer flare of his helmet. In its place, covering the top and back of his head, was a soft black hood.

"You are feeling better," Anakin observed, as Luke dug into his plate of eggs, pastry, and fruit - always so much fresh fruit, on this smoggy urban planet that didn't seem to have gardens or greenhouses anywhere. Luke still felt a little guilty about it.

"Yeah," said Luke, even though it hadn't been a question. His mind and his father's were so closely linked in the Force that it didn't have to be one.

"The politics of this are... distasteful. But necessary. I will ensure you do not have to do that often."

Luke gave his father a dubious look. Anakin was trying really hard not to be evil anymore. But he was still very quick to write off Imperial things, cruel or callous or even just a little bit _off_ , as inevitable fates that no one could change. It wasn’t usually true, in Luke’s opinion; Anakin was the Emperor. He could change a lot of things.

Sometimes Luke corrected Anakin about that. But not often. He knew it wore on his father, trying to change so many things about himself at once, and he'd also seen the signs of whatever was happening with Tarkin. The way Tarkin, at unexpected moments, was starting to write off little bits of mercy or kindness - like the promises of reconciliation in Luke's speech - with the same kind of fraught resignation. Sometimes Luke could feel the tension between his needs and Tarkin's - between Anakin's son and Anakin's lover, stretching Anakin out like a wire about to snap. When Luke felt that, he knew it wasn't time to push.

"You would like a change of scenery," said Anakin, and again it wasn't a question, but Luke hadn't even realized it was true until his father said it. Yes, it would help a _lot_ to get out of this palace, off Coruscant. Go someplace else for a while and clear his head.

(As long as it wasn't Mustafar. Anakin had gone back there a few times for routine medical treatment and therapy, but Luke had not gone with him. The lava fortress gave him the creeps even more than the palace did.)

Luke nodded, spearing another forkful of eggs. "I think I could use some fresh air and quiet, yeah."

But Luke had responsibilities here. He couldn't just run off.

He turned to B-3Q. "Threecue, do I have any meetings or anything?"

"Yes, Your Highness. Following your official introduction to the Empire, a large number of officials have expressed interest in meeting with you and have put in scheduling requests. It's up to you to evaluate and approve those requests at your leisure. The only firm commitment on your schedule is with Architect Leffe and Dr. Terez, today at eleven-hundred, regarding the memorial."

Anakin waved a gloved hand. "You should go to your meeting, but we can dispense with the rest of them. For a few days, at least. How do you feel about water? And greenery? And... history."

"I like those things," said Luke, curious where this was going. He'd never really seen more than a tank-full of water at a time, or even any trees or wildflowers, until he arrived at the old Rebel base on Yavin IV. The jungle was exotic and fascinating; the quiet marshes of Pantora, where the next Rebel base had been built, even more so. On Pantora he'd sometimes worried that if he put a foot wrong, he could slip below that calm algae-covered surface and just vanish. But it had been the kind of fear that intrigued him more than it bothered him. Before Anakin found him, he'd been starting to think about learning to swim.

"You have been studying your mother," Anakin added.

Luke nodded, feeling a little shy. Anakin had a lot of feelings about Padmé, and talking about them for too long seemed to make him upset. Luke had tried not to make him talk about it more than he needed to. But he hadn't hidden the fact that he was looking up vids of her, reading her speeches and her biographies, trying to figure out how he could be like her. She had been royal and powerful but good and wise - not like the people in the Empire. She'd actually cared if her galaxy was a good place to live or not.

"We could make a state visit," said Anakin, hesitantly. "To her memorial. She is well loved on Naboo."

Luke blinked and put his fork down. "Is that- safe?"

 _Safe_ wasn't the right word, but he didn't know what was. He hadn't mentioned his mother's name aloud in his speech. They'd all agreed that this was politically delicate enough already without having to explain to the public that Padmé Amidala, a good woman with a spotless reputation among Imperials and Rebels alike, was the one who'd had Darth Vader's baby. If Anakin suddenly announced to the world that he had a son, and his first public act with that son was to take him to visit a random queen's grave... Well, people would figure out the connection.

Anakin waved an equivocal hand. "We need not tell them why we are there. If some of them work it out, it will be only a rumor. And we could make it one part of a longer state visit. There are beautiful open spaces on Naboo, water and woods and meadows and fresh air. Perhaps even history that might be of use for your memorial."

Luke smiled. Making a memorial to the Jedi Order had been his idea. Anakin had made the arrangements to bring the experts in, but he was keeping Luke in charge of that project, staying at arm's length, even when Architect Leffe and Dr. Terez dropped increasingly obvious hints about how nice it would be to have someone around who remembered the Jedi Order from its heyday. Most people didn't know that Emperor Vader was Anakin, but most people knew he'd been a Jedi once.

"And you'll come with me and look at all that?"

"If you wish," said Anakin, which was more of a concession than he usually gave. Luke popped a bit of fruit in his mouth, as the smoggy morning light streamed in through the breakfast nook's window, and smiled.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Leia's training goes well, except for the "anger" part.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, the title of this story is from [this very sad song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEK6X2llsUY) by The Pretty Reckless. I have no idea if the song will end up being relevant to the story as it develops or not, but I wanted water imagery and this one's been in my head.

There had been no point going back to Orto Plutonia now that the Rebels had their truce with the Empire. Instead, Ahsoka Tano had set up an obstacle course in an out-of-the-way part of the marshes near Pantora's Rebel base, and that was the course Leia ran now, pushing harder and harder, beating her own time records again and again. Running along the wooden walkways that overlooked the shallow water, ducking under a makeshift barrier. Up the trunk of a willow tree, flipping back down without disturbing the branches. Landing, two-footed, on the walkway's railing rather than the walkway itself, and then running along _that_ for thirty feet, keeping her balance. A training remote buzzed into operation, and she lit her white lightsaber, dodging and deflecting the bolts as she ran.

Luke Skywalker's voice kept echoing in her head.

_I know I was wrong._

The Empire had broadcast that speech on all its channels yesterday, and Leia couldn't get it out of her head. None of the Rebels could - every conversation here seemed to wind back around to his name, like the name of a wound. He had been their hero, and he had betrayed them all.

Slash. Whoosh. The remote kept firing, and she kept running, the bluish reeds of the marsh below her blurring with speed. She jerked her saber left, right, each movement deflecting a bolt that she hadn't even consciously detected before her instincts told her to move.

_That was a path that only prolonged the conflict._

His face, dolled up for the cameras, as wooden and tense as a hostage reading out his ransom note.

Slash. Slash. She did another flip in the air, hopping down from the railing to a wider platform. This was meant to be the end of the course, but Leia wanted to keep running. There was so much tension in her limbs that didn't have any other outlet. Leia wasn't going to stand still, saying platitudes about peace that no one believed. Leia was going to _fight._

_I renounce the Rebel cause._

Slash. Whoosh. The remote had stopped firing, but there were still lightsaber forms to drill, and Leia ran through them in whatever order occurred to her, her hands tight and knuckles paling at the saber's hilt.

_I am proud to be a member of Emperor Vader's family-_

"Leia," said a voice in warning nearby.

Leia spun and turned on it before she knew what she was doing. So many of these new skills she was learning relied on instinct, on reacting quicker than the speed of conscious thought. She lashed out -

_\- at Ahsoka -_

\- and Ahsoka instantly lit her own saber, white like Leia's, blocking the blow. They looked at each other across the crossed sabers for a split second, framed in bright white light against the blue-green marsh, before the full knowledge of what she'd just done hit her, and she stumbled backwards, chagrined.

Her heel hit a rotten spot in the wood, and both walkway and railing gave out underneath her. She lost her balance and fell, landing in a heap in the shallow water with an ungodly splash.

There was the familiar _hiss-snap_ of Ahsoka's lightsaber turning off, and the Togruta stepped to the edge of the rotten patch, looking down at her. "You're letting your anger get the better of you."

"I am not," Leia protested, but she knew what she'd done. She'd acted without thinking, followed her instincts the way Jedi were supposed to, but her angry, startled instincts had led her to turn on her teacher.

Ahsoka crossed her arms.

Leia's own saber had automatically shut off when it fell out of her hands. She fished it out of the mud - it was already easy for Leia to sense in the Force where her saber was - and then stood up. She'd worn a gray jumpsuit for this training session, something that could handle a little sweat and some rough treatment, but it was soaked now and there was marsh mud and algae all over it, soaking through the tough fabric. She tried to brush the mud off with her hands, but that only made it worse.

"You Jedi don't make any sense," she complained. "You want me to act without thinking and then you blame me when I do something thoughtless."

"Why do you think we talk about mastering our emotions?" Ahsoka countered. "Keeping our minds clear? Your instincts aren't the problem. It's that you were drawing on them out of aggression."

"Gee, I'm glad no one's ever _aggressive,_ " said Leia, scowling and struggling through the knee-deep water, "in high-speed _laser sword combat._ "

But she knew she wasn't being quite fair. Leia hadn't been defending anything or trying to save anyone. Her actual run of the obstacle course had been over, and she'd kept going, just because she was angry and wanted to keep moving fast and hard a little longer. Just because she wanted to _fight._

Ahsoka bent down over the ruined part of the walkway, keeping her feet well clear of the rotten patch, and held out her hand for Leia to grasp. "Come on. We can get you cleaned up at the base."

Leia took the hand and hoisted herself up, still grumbling. It was only a kilometer from here to the base, but was going to feel like a longer walk muddy and dripping with pond water.

"You're learning fast," Ahsoka said conversationally as Leia regained her balance. "But you weren't focused on running the course. What were you thinking about?"

"Luke," Leia grumbled, knowing that Ahsoka already knew. She picked a dead reed out of her hair.

"What about him?"

"The usual."

"You're still angry," Ahsoka observed, and Leia rolled her eyes to the heavens.

Luke was her brother. He didn't know that yet - with any luck, he and Vader would never find out - but she did. And he was lost to her just like the rest of her family. Almost worse, because she still had to look at his face in the news as he renounced everything she believed in. Of course she was angry.

"Do you think," Ahsoka continued, more softly, "that he believed what he was saying?"

Leia reached out and took a hold of the railing - careful not to lean on it, this close to the rotten patch. Her knuckles whitened around it.

"No," she whispered. She was angry with Luke, but she didn't really think that little of him.

"What do you think he was trying to do?"

Leia took a deep breath, and then another. The Rebellion's spies had witnessed most of what happened when Luke and Vader argued Tarkin into writing the truce. Luke had even told them how he felt about it, and they'd reported back faithfully. Those particular spies weren't in play anymore, but they'd seen enough.

"I think," she said, "he's trying to get through to Vader. He wants a father and he... thinks he can make Vader a better person. Vader kidnapped him and he started to identify with his captor, and he thinks the Anakin Skywalker who fought for the Republic is still in there somewhere. He's telling himself that if he plays along and stops openly being a Rebel, he can change the Empire from the inside. Then he'd have everything he wants. His father, and his friends, and his ideals. No conflict. Peace."

She rolled her eyes; that was one of the first lessons her real parents had taught her. Alderaan was a peaceful planet, not only because it had no weapons, but because people were well-treated there and their voices were listened to. Even if they'd had weapons, they wouldn't have needed to use them. If you didn't have that, if people deep-down wanted to rebel but stayed in line out of fear, then that wasn't real peace. The Empire's _order and peace_ had always been a lie.

"What does your heart tell you about that?" said Ahsoka.

Leia rounded on her. "Luke's being _stupid._ You can't reform something as corrupt as the Empire from inside. It's rotten to the core. It has to _go._ And so does Vader. I know he meant something to you and Obi-Wan before, but you can't come back from the kinds of things Vader has done. He can't ever be what he was before. Why can't you see that?"

Ahsoka gave her a long look, grave and unsure. Leia and Ashoka could read each other's thoughts easily, and Leia had watched Ahsoka and the ghost of Obi-Wan arguing about this, both of them hopeful and confused and neither quite trusting their own minds. Both of them wanted Anakin Skywalker back, and both of them felt that he was changing. But neither of them was sure just how much of a change it was going to be. Neither of them knew how soon it would be safe to even speak to him. And both of them knew that their nostalgia, their _attachment,_ could lead them astray.

"Leia," said Ahsoka, just as she was turning to go. "Show me your lightsaber."

Leia faced Ahsoka and held it out. Lightsabers were sacred objects to the Jedi. She hoped she'd cleaned it enough after it fell in the swamp. Could lightsabers get water damage?

"Show me the blade."

She thumbed the button on her saber and the white blade _snap-hiss_ ed out between them.

"What color is it?" said Ahsoka.

"White," said Leia, frowning - she didn't like these kinds of questions, the ones with answers so obvious she shouldn't have had to say them, designed just to lead her along into one object lesson or another.

"Do you know what that color means for a lightsaber?"

Leia shook her head. "No."

"Close your eyes. Feel the saber in your hand."

Leia complied. Lightsabers weren't alive the way people were, but they carried feelings. She had always felt that this saber had a history. It had felt pain before, and it had been healed.

"Do you know," said Ahsoka, "how Sith make their lightsabers?"

Leia shook her head, disturbed. Was she holding a Sith weapon? That couldn't be right. It didn't feel like a Sith weapon.

"They don't," said Ahsoka. "There aren't any red kyber crystals in nature. Nothing starts out evil the way a Sith weapon is evil. Every Sith blade begins as a Jedi blade. Either the Sith begins as a Jedi, or they defeat a Jedi and take the saber for themselves. Then they _bleed_ the crystal - do you know what that means? It's a way of corrupting it. They break it a little, and they fill it with the Dark Side. That's what produces the red color; it only ever comes out of a blade that was fractured in that particular way."

Leia frowned more deeply. She could feel something, some faint affirmation or recognition, from inside the saber. It remembered deep down, the way a human body remembered its injuries, what it had been like to be broken that way.

"This belonged to a Sith," she guessed. "An Inquisitor?" That was counter-intuitive; it was only a single blade, and it didn't have the characteristic circular, spinning hilt. Ahsoka must have rebuild the casing, almost from scratch.

"Yes," said Ahsoka. "A crystal that's been bled can be healed. It's hard to do, but it's not that complicated - it just takes a lot of focus. When the process is finished and the crystal is purified, it turns white. It can't be the color it was before. It can't ever be quite the same. But it can still be something good."

Leia opened her eyes and turned the saber back off. Ahsoka turned and started to walk back toward the base, along those endless wooden walkways that criscrossed the marsh. Her convor detached from the nearby tree where it had been sitting and flew along at her side.

Leia knew a metaphor when she saw one. But that didn't mean she _agreed._

"People aren't lightsabers," she argued, jogging to catch up. "People aren't simple like that. People make _choices._ "

"They do."

"You fixed the Inquisitor's lightsabers, but you didn't fix any of the Inquisitors, did you?"

She expected Ahsoka to flinch away from that question, but she kept walking steadily, unperturbed. That mind of Ahsoka's, like a deep still pool, was just maddening sometimes. "There was no opportunity. A mind has to be open before it can change. In the middle of battle-"

"Has it _ever_ happened?" Leia raced forward a few steps just to plant her feet in front of Ahsoka, making her stop, making her face her. "Has there ever been a Sith who stopped being a Sith? Really stopped, not just pretended to stop, not just got a little less awful. Not someone who did one nice thing and then died before they could face any consequence. Someone who actually... was good for the rest of their life. Just one."

Ahsoka looked down, uncertain. "There are legends..."

" _Legends?_ " Leia repeated in disgust.

But she could feel Ahsoka thinking hard as she gazed down into the reed-choked water, wrestling with something in her own mind.

"I think," said Ahsoka, "that there are things the Jedi don't like to talk about. If people thought they could be redeemed from the Dark Side, they might go to the darkness on purpose, thinking that they could take it back later, and that would make all the death and suffering okay. There's a certain kind of person who thinks they can play with the darkness without letting it consume them, and they're always wrong. It's how some of the worst of the Sith Lords were made. And Sith all use assumed names anyway - if someone did come back, and they had the Jedi Council's backing, they could hide who they were. So many of our records were destroyed in the Jedi Purge. If there was something only the Council knew - or even only the Jedi Masters..."

"You're just making all that up." There was no shred of evidence in that speech. Just things that sounded plausible to Ahsoka, things that she wanted to believe.

"Maybe." Ahsoka looked back at her, squaring her shoulders and meeting her gaze. "Let's find out together. I don't know where Master Yoda is, but I know a place where we could start looking for the answers on our own."

She started walking again, and Leia hurried along at her side, dismayed. "That wasn't part of the deal. You're supposed to teach me to use the Force-"

"I agreed to teach you what I know about the Force," said Ahsoka, unflappable. "Practical knowledge, but also moral knowledge. You need to know what it means to have this power. If I didn't pass on everything I know about that, too - if I didn't try to answer your most difficult questions to the best of my ability - I'd be failing you. Besides, you'll like this place. It's on Padmé Amidala's planet."

Leia gave her a flat look. "Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like _any_ of this?"

Ahsoka smiled back at her, with the hint of a mischievous grin, and continued on her way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Luke studies three memorials for three very different things.

Luke managed to pack most of his things before eleven hundred, but he did have to go to the meeting about the memorial. Luke was very interested in this memorial, which was why he'd picked it as his first official act. He'd always known that the Imperial Palace used to be the Jedi Temple, but he had taken a while to put two and two together and realize that meant a lot of the massacre of the Jedi Order had happened right under his feet. Some of the rooms on the palace's lower levels hadn't been changed since then, except for clearing out the bodies.

Architect Leffe was a squat human woman with short, curly hair, and Dr. Terez was a tall Theelin with bright violet skin and little spikes protruding from his forehead. He wore a gray tunic, oddly muted next to his natural colors, and a pair of narrow spectacles. Both of them vibrated with excitement in the Force as they pulled out the datapads showing their progress. This was a project unlike any other - one that, until recently, would have been forbidden.

"I've got a preliminary design for the memorial's layout," Leffe announced, bringing up a holoprojection and letting it slowly rotate in the air. "This would encompass all the important parts of the unfinished area, while still leaving room for you and Emperor Vader to build your new quarters nearby."

"That looks good," said Luke automatically. He didn't really understand what he was looking at - he would have needed an education like Leffe's to grasp the finer points - but it looked properly solemn and Jedi-like. There was a big entrance vestibule, a smaller set of rooms showing what Jedi rooms would have looked like when the temple was in use, a garden and a fountain under a muted display of names. It did look good, but also it seemed to Luke that a big part of a prince's job was saying _yes, uh-huh, good work_ to people who knew what they were doing a lot better than he did - and he knew Leffe would get around to explaining all the details and their meanings before the meeting was over, even if he didn't ask.

"The Jedi Order was only destroyed twenty years ago," Dr. Terez added, steepling his violet fingers. "That means they existed within living memory. The process of seeking out correct information about them is going better than I'd feared. You wouldn't believe how many of my colleagues - ah, _off_ the record, Your Highness, you wouldn't believe how many people, whom I won't name, have secretly kept notes about them that should officially have been destroyed, sometimes including primary source material. I'm hearing rumors that there may even be relics..."

When Palpatine killed all the Jedi, he hadn't only killed all the people; he'd also tried to erase their memory. Books about the Force had been burned. Speaking too highly of them, or of the Light Side of the Force, became sedition. A few sects, like the Guardians of the Whills, had been allowed to keep remembering as long as they didn't make trouble, but one by one those sects had started to pose problems for the Empire, and they, too, had been destroyed. A lot of people had stopped believing in the Force at all; before Luke met Ben Kenobi, he hadn't even heard of it.

But Anakin had never liked embodying a thing that didn't officially exist. As soon as Palpatine was gone, he'd repealed all those laws. In Anakin and Tarkin's administration, people could speak about the Force and the Jedi as they saw fit.

Dr. Terez was a historian, and one of his specialties was the military history of the Clone Wars. The Jedi had been so involved in that war that it must be almost impossible to study that field without saying something forbidden. Luke was certain Terez must be one of those people who'd secretly kept notes on the Jedi that they weren't supposed to. But that only made him better suited for the job.

"But," said Terez, "unfortunately, gaps remain. What we really need is a living Jedi - even a former Jedi. However much information we gather ourselves, only a Jedi could tell us for sure if these memorial plans are properly reverent, according to Jedi ideas of reverence and memory and death. The rest of us, however noble our intent, simply don't have the _sense_ for it. I don't suppose your father has, ah, volunteered..."

Not many people knew Anakin's name, or the details of why he'd turned against the Jedi; but everybody knew that he'd used to be one of them, once.

"I mentioned it," said Luke. This wasn't the first time Terez had made this request. "He really didn't seem comfortable with it, but I'm hoping he'll come around. I want to know more about what he remembers of the Jedi, too. But you get why it's awkward for him, right?" Of course Terez got why it was awkward; he was a historian who studied the Clone Wars.

"Well," said Terez, nodding a little too quickly. "I completely understand But the offer is open; we'd be in his debt for anything he'd be able to tell us, even a little..."

Luke nodded back. "I'll let you know right away."

*

"It is out of the question," said Anakin, hours later, on the shuttle to Naboo.

They were making their way through the blue swirl of hyperspace, and they weren't alone. There was a pilot at the front of the shuttle, and a captain named Piett sitting a respectful distance away - after some initial confusion about what kinds of palace aides and advisers Anakin did and didn't need, he'd settled on drafting Piett as a general-purpose assistant. A second shuttle, following behind them in the midst of the TIE fighter escort, held stormtroopers and other staff who would follow them on the first day of their visit. They'd have alone time later, but when you were an Emperor everything was about appearances, and it was politically best to make this an official state visit for a while before they got the quiet and fresh air that they really wanted.

"I don't see why," Luke whined. "Look, if there are things you don't want to talk about, you can leave those out - they're not going to ask anything bad. They just want to know stuff like what the Jedi believed, what their everyday life was like, what their names were."

"I exterminated the Jedi," Anakin snapped. "Would you let a Hutt build a memorial for slaves?"

And Luke didn't know what to say to that at all.

*

Luke pressed his nose eagerly to the shuttle's window as they descended. Tatooine was an empty dustball, Mustafar was an unnerving pile of lava, and Coruscant was only traffic and smog as far as the eye could see. But Naboo's surface shone with a green brighter than Yavin's jungles and a blue that was all its own.

He could feel his father, silent in the chair next to his, having a more complicated reaction. Anakin had actual memories of this place. Most of them were good, but they were all firmly in the past. Luke's mother had been born here, married him here, and died here. And some people he hadn't liked as much were from here, too.

Anakin's scheduling aides had created an official itinerary for them. Since it was a state visit, they would spend today visiting important parts of Theed. They'd have a short meeting at the palace itself, and they'd visit several memorials, not only Padmé's. They'd go to a fancy state dinner with a lot of the most important people on Naboo, and in the evening they would see a Nubian ballet. Then tomorrow, they'd get to have a quieter day - _recreation,_ said the schedule - exploring the meadowlands and the coasts with only a nominal guard. That was when they'd have the actual change of scenery Luke wanted. But at least today would be interesting.

Theed was a beautiful city, with its stately domes rising from the cliff between the waterfalls. Luke's breath fogged the shuttle window as he stared out. Anakin's fortress on Mustafar was on a cliff like this, but on Mustafar it was lava that ran down the cliff's edges, not water, and the fortress stood high and grim above it like the edge of a blade. Theed's rounded towers and delicate cascades were the opposite of that. They looked gentle and soft.

As the shuttle thunked down and the loading ramp extended, Luke discovered that Theed smelled good, too. The air was fresh and pleasantly cool. There was salt in it, and something green like flowers, but mostly it just smelled _clean._ He walked eagerly down into it, past the assembled honor guard, into the square where a whole bunch of Nubian officials in colorful finery had waited to meet them on bended knee.

*

A lot of the palace meeting went over Luke's head, but he was interested anyway. Anakin exchanged words with a whole lot of nervous people who were variously senators, advisers to the queen, or security officials. Most of the words didn't mean much except that Naboo was definitely still in the Empire and everyone was fine with that - or pretending to be, because everyone was also afraid of Anakin. The Queen was a girl younger than Luke, with a headdress that drew out her hair into a massive halo around her head. Her face was painted in the same stark white, with the same precise spots of color on the lips and cheeks, as his mother's had once been. He tried not to stare.

Anakin didn't threaten anybody or try to choke them. But Luke could feel his mind tensing and drawing in on itself. They both knew what came next. They were here to visit memorials, after all, and there was more than one important person from Naboo who'd died at some point and who'd played an important role in Anakin's life.

The most obvious grave for them to visit - so obvious that they really _couldn't_ have bowed out, unless Anakin wanted to suddenly answer a lot of awkward questions about the line of succession - was Emperor Palpatine's.

It was a grand space, still under construction, with building crews working away at large pillars and plinths where a statue would go. But the central area was ready, and the memorial's security guards ushered Emperor Vader and Prince Luke in through a wall of yellow tape and temporary fencing. There was a garden here, freshly planted, its flowers already beginning to bloom in soft pastel shades, pink and red and white. In the center of it lay a rectangular sarcophagus. Just a box of heavy stone, elegantly and abstractly carved, with Palpatine's name chiseled into the lid. A cobblestone path wound around the garden's edge. Surrounding it were pale stone walls carved with sayings of Palpatine's or hung with art, mostly showing him in his prime, before an altercation with the Jedi had scarred him; but that part wasn't all set up yet. It wasn't quite a place of peaceful repose - there were too many construction sounds everywhere - but Luke could see the effect it was meant to have.

Anakin's mind, as the two of them walked onto that cobblestone path, was not peaceful at all.

Palpatine had been the one who turned Anakin to the Dark Side. For nineteen years, he'd treated him terribly in a million different ways, most of which Luke didn't really understand - he didn't know details, only felt the pain and damage in Anakin's mind when the subject came up. Luke could feel those things now as they walked, mindful of the eyes on them both. For almost twenty years, until he managed to enlist Tarkin's help, Anakin had thought there was no way out of that arrangement at all.

Anakin had been the one who _killed_ Palpatine. Everyone in the palace more or less knew it, even if the official story said otherwise.

Luke kept himself nervously close to his father's side. Anakin took a few steps down the cobblestone path, looked down at the sarcophagus, and stood like that for a minute, very still. There'd been a big state funeral for Palpatine, but Anakin hadn't attended - he'd been recovering from injuries at the time. This was the first time he'd had to do anything like this.

Luke could feel Piett and the workers and guards watching nervously. He was sure Anakin could feel that too, if he bothered to pay attention. All of them were wondering the same thing. What was Anakin going to do here? If he made a scene, if he tried to somehow desecrate his old master's grave, could they stop him?

At last Anakin looked back up. His masked face would have been inscrutable to anyone but Luke.

"He is dead," Anakin said at last. "He was my master. He made me who I am."

To everyone else in earshot, the words would have sounded flat, but there was a dark, obscure levity in Anakin's mind. He had managed to save face and say something that sounded like conventional praise - when it was actually, in his mind, one of the darkest accusations possible. Palpatine would have appreciated a double meaning like that.

Anakin turned on his heel and walked - with Luke hurrying beside him - back out.

*

"Did you see what it said on the base of the sarcophagus?" Anakin asked him later, when they had a moment alone on the speeder between one memorial and another. That strange, dark amusement had not left his mind.

Luke squinted as he tried to remember. "It said, here the first Emperor... lies in state?"

"I am told," said Anakin, "that it was difficult to scrape up the pieces of him. To sit, stand, or lie down requires limbs in a certain relation to each other. That is not possible now."

"Um," said Luke uncomfortably.

"Which means," Anakin continued, "that he can never lie again."

" _Father,_ " Luke groaned, and through the mental bond he felt unrepentant mirth.

*

Padmé Amidala's memorial was in another part of Theed, a short ride away. There was a large square, and a garden a little like Palpatine's, though the specific flowers and patterns were different. At the center stood a small mausoleum with a roof. A huge carving of Queen Amidala's face, makeup and headdress and all, looked down over the square like a benificent goddess, and other art decorated the walls.

Anakin's mind felt different here. Palpatine's memorial had been stressful to look at, but here the grief sat heavier and deeper. He moved through the square only slowly, stopping for long looks at each of the paintings and inscriptions. Luke kept an eye on him, unsure what to expect.

He gazed up with half his attention at a picture of Padmé in the Senate, not much older than him, making some passionate speech - it wasn't clear from the picture what exactly the speech was about, but there was an inscription below it with a vague quote, stripped of context, something pretty about justice and peace. She looked so beautiful and brave. Padmé wouldn't have given a speech like Luke's, he thought, telling half-truths just to smooth things over. She would have told the whole galaxy exactly what she thought. Like Leia.

He didn't realize his mind had wandered until Anakin's angry voice snapped him out of it. "What is _this?_ "

Anakin had happened on one of the paintings at the memorial's edge. It showed Queen Amidala and Senator Palpatine sitting together in their Senate pod. Palpatine gazed at her like a proud father, his expression benevolent, hers wise and trusting.

Piett swallowed hard - he'd already maneuvered to Anakin's side before Luke noticed the problem, standing at attention, hands clasped nervously behind his back. "It's a painting of the late Queen with the then-Senator Palpatine, my lord. I believe the purpose of the painting was to symbolize the Empire's implicit approval-"

"Get it out of here," Anakin growled, apoplectic. His hands had curled into tight fists. "He has his own memorial now. He has no business in _hers._ "

Piett exchanged a glance with one of the Nubian functionaries standing a little further off, some artist or architect who seemed responsible for all this. "Of course, my lord." But neither of them moved to take it away right that instant - it was a mural on a stone wall; it couldn't just be taken down like a picture frame - and that wasn't enough for Anakin. He stepped towards them, and Luke could feel a violent impulse rising like the heat from a furnace.

"Father," he said, rushing to Anakin's side.

And that seemed to be enough - Luke was present enough in the Force to Anakin's senses, and vulnerable enough, to snap him out of it. It took an effort, but he lowered his hand and turned away.

"See it done," said Anakin, "on the soonest reasonable schedule." And he stalked away from both of them.

*

When it was time to go into the mausoleum, Anakin insisted that they do it alone, just him and Luke. Luke followed obediently. He didn't think they were fooling anybody here, when it came to why Anakin was suddenly interested in this particular Queen of Naboo. But that was okay; Luke wasn't all that invested in keeping it a secret. The arrangements they'd made would keep the rumors down to a dull roar instead of plastering them all over the newsnets right away.

The mausoleum was more closed-in than the outer parts of the memorial, almost claustrophobic; Luke didn't think regular people were allowed in here too often. The effect was softened by the stained-glass windows, each showing Padmé in one of her colorful dresses. Maybe it wasn't the space itself that felt claustrophobic - maybe it was the sheer oppressive strength of the emotions in his father's mind, filling the room like a thick fog. It had been nineteen years, but the hurt of losing her was still something that went to Anakin's core. Luke couldn't _see_ any emotion in Anakin's face, behind the mask, and he didn't make any sound, but the psychic sense of him as he turned to the casket on its bier was almost too much on its own, a silent howl of pain. He didn't think Anakin had ever actually visited this place anymore. He would be willing to bet that it hadn't been allowed.

Luke didn't know where to look. Anakin didn't seem to mind him looking, but it wasn't clear if he actually wanted Luke to see, or if he was so absorbed in his feelings that he'd literally forgotten Luke was there.

Anakin dropped to one knee in front of the bier, and for a long minute no one could bring themselves to say anything.

Luke cautiously examined the casket. It was painted with Padmé's likeness, eyes closed and flowers like stars in her hair. She'd been very beautiful. He wondered, not for the first time that day, what she would have thought of him.

"She would have been a good mother," Anakin said at length - Luke couldn't tell if it was an answer to his thoughts, or if Anakin's mind had gone there on its own. His voice was thick with emotion, barely intelligible. "She would have been proud of you."

"You think so?" said Luke, strangely uneasy.

"She believed in peace," Anakin explained. "To broker peace where none thought it could survive, to bring disparate sides together for a common cause, through a dramatic gesture no one could have predicted - that is very like her. Yes, my son. She would be proud."

Luke looked down at Padmé's painted face on the casket's lid, wondering if he could believe it.

"She'd be proud of you, too," he said, on impulse. He wasn't sure of this, but it seemed to match what he knew, and it seemed like something his father needed to hear. "For... listening. For realizing there was a better way."

But Anakin only bowed his head, and Luke knew that he didn't believe it at all.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Luke's memorial planning has an unexpected consequence; Anakin abruptly stops following the itinerary; and several very different people, for several very different reasons, begin to converge on the same ruined temple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes all i need from a story is "let's explore a very big weird building that might be magic and/or alive." i have no idea why i need this from a story.

"Thissa far as I can take you, ma'ams," said Dr. Aphra's Gungan guide, gesturing to the seascape in front of their little skiff. She'd hired this guy for peanuts after she heard a rumor about some Jedi ruins, conveniently not too picked over yet, partly because they were underwater and partly becaues of some silly taboo. Jedi artifacts weren't Aphra's specialty, but she could be flexible - especially since the Empire had just made them one of the hottest archaeological commodities around.

"Great," said Aphra, already standing to slip on her wet suit and breath mask. A bag of simple climbing, excavation, and infiltration materials went over her shoulder. The water before her sparkled with afternoon sunlight, not too warm but tolerable, the waves rolling up and down in a gentle breeze. She'd packed carefully for this - Jedi ruins were even weirder than the other kinds. There was no telling what she'd find, which was half the fun.

She could only faintly see her destination in the distance. A low green island poked out of the sea about a mile or two away. The temple itself wasn't visible - only the entrance to the cavern that had once contained it, a darkened shape just underneath the waves. Thousands of years ago, this temple had been half-above the water, half-below it, an amphibious space where terrestrial and acquatic species could mingle and worship together. Then it sank further - because of a curse, said the legends, but to Aphra it looked like a pretty standard case of coastal land subsiding - and was abandoned.

Everyone was paying good money for Jedi artifacts, all of a sudden, because the new Imperial Prince - cute enough on the holos, clearly new at this, a bit daffy-looking - was building a memorial for the Jedi Order. A certain Theelin named Terez, tasked with that project, had begun looking through all sorts of unofficial channels for relics that could be put there. _Repatriation,_ he called it - under the adorably naive assumption that these relics were currently in private collections, and that the Jedi memorial would be a more respectful home - but of course when you put out a call as broadly as Terez's, with a juicy Imperial reward, people were going to think creatively.

The Jedi were dead already; they weren't gonna care if their artifacts were in one place or another. Aphra was in this for the money.

She looked down at the water, thinking she saw something move underneath it. Big creatures lived in waters like these, carnivorous creatures. Fortunately, she'd planned for that.

"Meesa not likin' this," said the guide, looking down at the same underwater shadow. "This whole island, off limits for Gungans. _Bombad_ cursed."

Yeah, yeah, Aphra already knew that, mostly because the Gungans had already told her _sixteen_ times. "That's not a curse," she said. "That's just a big guy looking for dinner. Drop the bait and then take us about twenty degrees counterclockwise."

On the back of the boat a seal-like creature was trussed up, strong and fat and still alive and, most importantly, about twice as big as Aphra. They loosed it from the net and dropped it into the water, and then the Gungan guided their boat around as ordered, muttering to himself all the while. "Meesa better be getting paid for this."

"Just a little further," Aphra ordered, ignoring him. "A little... there." She'd been peering into the water to get a sense of when they were far enough away from the monster. From here, the coast looked clear. "Great. Here's your pay; I can swim in from here." Not that she liked the idea of a mile or two of pointless swimming through a monster-infested sea; but this was the only Gungan she'd been able to hire to take her even this far, and he was adamant that he'd go no further. So Aphra got to have a swim. The exercise would be good for her.

She handed over the credit chits. The Gungan took them and scowled. "Thissa _half_ what we agreed on!"

"Sure is. Because we agreed on a ride here and a ride back. Stick around and be ready to pick me up if there's trouble; you'll get the rest when we return. I'll comm you. Enjoy the sun. Don't get eaten."

She flashed him an unnecessarily big grin. Before she could hear out the rest of his complaint, she'd put on her breath mask and dived.

*

Ahsoka looked down from the cockpit of the rented skiff toward the crumbling cliffside. There was very little of the old island left, and the entrance to what had once been a grand, amphibious cavern now lay completely submerged under the waves. She didn't need eyes to feel Leia's skeptical look. Leia had lived in Rebel barracks and Imperial prisons; she _believed_ in going to the front lines and getting her hands dirty; but she was still a girl who'd grown up in a palace, and nothing messy or slapdash impressed her.

They were alone, more or less. Ahsoka could feel many creatures alive under the water; a couple were large and strong enough in the Force to pose a potential obstacle. There was also a Gungan fishing boat in the distance, but it had stayed a respectful distance away and wasn't moving any closer. Ahsoka had heard that the locals stayed away from this place out of respect, or maybe fear; even on the Light Side, the two could coincide.

"I don't see anything," said Leia - looking at the island itself, little more than a rocky atoll poking its nose above the water. Wildflowers sprang up from its stones in all colors, but there was nothing that looked like recent habitation.

"Look down," said Ahsoka, gesturing to the cave entrance. "We'll have to mask up."

Leia nodded and pulled the breath mask over her nose and mouth. These things were cheaply available on Naboo, allowing humans to explore underwater without drowning. They were whitish and translucent, and they attached to the other swimming gear the two of them had put on before they arrived. Leia had picked a diving suit that was all white, clinging to her petite body in a way that would have looked stylish if not for the awkward triangular fins at her feet. Ahsoka's was a black that set off the white striped of her lekku. Underwater caves weren't safe places, but Leia was brave and coolheaded and had mountaneering experience; she'd be fine.

As Ahsoka affixed her own mask and did a few final checks, she felt an odd prickle at the back of her neck.

It was reflexive to reach out with the Force and look behind her. Something was here - not the life forms she'd sensed in the immediate vicinity, but something else, something further away but _big._

She knew what it was.

Immediately she pulled up shields around her mind, and then around Leia's. Leia looked up at her sharply, feeling the sudden intrusion. "What?"

"Just a precaution. I thought I felt something."

Leia's hand went to the lightsaber hanging at her belt. "Danger?"

"I don't... think so. Not close."

Ahsoka forced herself not to peek out from behind the shields to try to see better. That would only make it easier for the other side to see back.

Vader was on this planet.

She took a few steadying breaths. He was on the planet, but he wasn't close by. There were a lot of reasons why Anakin Skywalker might want to visit Naboo. He wasn't the Empire's Jedi killer anymore. Ahsoka wasn't entirely sure what he _was,_ but he'd stopped killing Jedi, adopted Luke, and made the Jedi faith legal again. That was the whole reason Ahsoka had brought Leia to this planet - to prove to her that people like Anakin could change.

Psychic shielding wasn't foolproof; it didn't make people disappear. It was more like camouflage. It would help her and Leia blend into the background, as long as they made no sudden moves or loud noises. As long as no one was looking too hard.

But Vader had no reason to look very hard. He wasn't here to hunt Jedi. He probably didn't sense her here. If he did sense her, he probably wouldn't come after her - there was no reason to, if all he sensed was a couple of beings strong in the Light Side. If he did come after her...

Ahsoka hadn't won that fight last time. Even strong as she was, she'd only managed to hold him off long enough for a miraculous escape. She couldn't count on another miracle this time.

But if it didn't come down to a fight, she wouldn't need one.

Ahsoka took another, deeper breath, using the warm sun and the gentle flow of Naboo's waves to calm herself.

"There's a Dark Sider," she said evenly. Something told her not to bring up _which_ Dark Sider. "Not nearby, just - somewhere on this planet. I don't think they noticed us." She looked sideways at Leia. "Do you want to back out for now, try this again later? Just to be safe."

Leia shook her head. "We've come this far."

"Okay." She flicked the switch to set her breath mask into operation, and she felt the gentle flow of canned air against her nose. "Ready?"

"Ready," said Leia, squaring her shoulders and looking down into the water.

They both leapt together.

*

Anakin was walking back to the speeder from Padmé's memorial when he felt it.

He stopped in his tracks; Luke and Piett and the rest of the minions around him come to a confused halt. The air was blue and clear; the cobblestones were all in order, Naboo looked as obnoxiously wholesome as it always did. He was aching inside from the visit to the mausoleum, the way he always ached inside about Padmé but worse - the memory of her pressing in on him like a vise. His mind was stuck on the topic of death. To suddenly think he saw some _other_ dead person from long ago - that must be his mind playing a trick on him. Anakin's mind had done that before.

But when he stood still, when he gave himself a breath or two to think about it, he knew what he'd felt. An impossibly familiar presence in the Force, many miles from here but not all _that_ far, moving to a particular destination. Shining bright for a moment. Then sealing itself.

_Almost_ sealing itself.

"Father?" said Luke, but Anakin held out a quelling hand.

If he focused, if he blocked out the busy city square and even Luke's bright presence - if he zeroed in on exactly the direction where he'd first felt it, he could feel it still. Not as strongly. An echo; she was shielding herself. There was someone else with her, strong and also shielded, but Anakin didn't care about that. It was _her._

Ahsoka.

It was impossible. He'd killed her. But her death had been strange, like Obi-Wan Kenobi's - just as he brought his blades down for the killing blow, she'd vanished. He wasn't sure if he'd _felt_ her death as strongly or as surely as he'd felt Obi-Wan's. He'd chalked that up to being hurt and distracted, emotionally rattled, breathing only with difficulty, part of his mask cut away. But maybe-

What if-

"Father," said Luke, grabbing his hand to get his attention. People had been trying to get his attention for several seconds now. None of the lackeys and guards liked delays, or strange behavior, or the potential implications of strange behavior from Anakin in particular. But Anakin did not care.

Anakin had suffered through these schedules and restrictions for long enough. He'd politely visited _Palpatine's_ grave. That was enough decorum for one day. Surely even a saintly Emperor, even a trained diplomat like Padmé, could not have been expected to do more. Padmé had always run off on her own errands, too, when it was important enough. Regardless of what the guards and advisers said.

"We are altering our plans," he said, striding quickly toward the speeder. "Remove the driver, guards, and crew. I will drive. There is something to which I must attend, and my son will attend it with me."

He heard Piett spluttering behind him. After a moment, the captain contained himself and instead jogged after Anakin, barely keeping up. "Very good, my lord - may I inform the local palace what came up?"

It was a clever way of asking Anakin _what the kriff was going on_ without actually, directly questioning Anakin's judgment. He'd have to remember that for later.

"No," he said, dragging Luke after him, and he shut the speeder door in Piett's face.

*

"Okay," said Luke, in the speeder's passenger seat, as Anakin steered out of the official motorcade and went racing off in his own direction. Naboo's flowery landscape blurred into an incoherent rush of color as it went past. The rest of the motorcade knew better than to follow. "That was weird. You know that was weird, right?"

"I felt something," said Anakin. "A presence." He maneuvered around a traffic stop - he was the Emperor and had diplomatic immunity; who cared about traffic? - and out across a field, zeroing in on the presence that lay somewhere tantalizingly ahead.

"Um," said Luke, looking guiltily behind him. "What kind of presence? A dangerous presence?"

"You will see," said Anakin - and he hoped he was right.

*

Once Ahsoka was underwater, once she'd blinked her eyes open and adjusted to the mild salt sting, she could see the cave entrance clearly. It was a grand archway carved out of the rocks, practically big enough to fly a shuttle through. At low tide, the top of it might even have peeked out above the waves.

As if on cue, a great sea beast rose lazily up in front of her, something big and blue-green and the size of a shuttle itself, with a wide, flat-snouted mouth and a long, slender body. It studied her and Leia as if studying a buffet, a quiet intelligence in its eyes. Ahsoka felt Leia tense up beside her, but she'd planned for this.

"We're descendants of the Jedi," said Ahsoka through her breath mask, holding out a hand and reaching out to the creature in the Force. She had to let down her shields just the tiniest bit to do so, and she did that carefully, ready to snatch them back up again in an instant. "We come in peace."

Beside her, Leia reached up and did the same thing. The nice thing about teaching Force-sensitives was that they could _feel_ what their teacher was doing, even without a direct instruction. And Leia was the fastest learner Ahsoka had ever met.

The sea creature looked them up and down, making slow chewing motions with that snouted face that could have swallowed them both. It seemed to have only just eaten, and that made it more placid than it might have been.

Ahsoka had a strange feeling - she sensed _other_ guardians, not far from here, creatures she couldn't quite get a read on without further lifting her shields - but this was the only one that had risen to confront her.

After considering them both, it moved to the side and allowed them through.

Ahsoka swam on, with Leia following close beside her. She'd brought lights, but the mouth of the cavern wasn't as dark as it could have been. Bivalves and little eels curled in the rock around them, and up ahead the space widened into a shallow pool the size of a hangar bay, lit dimly by small shafts of light from above.

The ruined temple stood before them, jutting up from the bottom of the cavern through the water. It looked more or less the way Ahsoka had surmised it would look: a vaguely conical tower, carved with holy runes and symbols partly washed away by the ravages of time. Parts of it were broken and crumbled, and parts of it fused into the rock underneath, seeming to lead into a deeper underground space. About a story and a half was visible here, under the water; the rest still poked up, in a ruined form, through the water's surface.

Ahsoka gestured upwards, and Leia followed. They broke the surface and treaded water. The space under the island had opened out into a dimly lit grotto, its surface rippling with waves much smaller than the surf outside. The entrance was underwater, but the ceiling arched high. Those lights Ahsoka had noticed came from fissures in the ceiling where sunlight shone through, dust motes slowly dancing in its slender beams.

There were a few snaking shapes, just under the water's surface, that might have been old platforms or walkways. Stone curves that approached the temple's mouth. Ahsoka led Leia onto one of those, where they could stand up, knee-deep.

"It doesn't look like much," said Leia.

"It's old," said Ahsoka. "Thousands of years ago, there was a Jedi outpost here. But this part of Naboo is all karst, and on a timescale of centuries, the ground isn't stable. At some point it shifted, and the waters rose, and the Jedi abandoned it. There are hundreds of ruins like this scattered across the galaxy, places the Jedi Order gradually stopped being able to maintain. I've been to many of them, but I'd never been to this one before, only heard the legends. Hold out your hand."

"Why?" said Leia, holding it out.

"Because most of these places need a pair to enter. A teacher and a student. Do what you did when we were talking to the guardian."

Leia nodded, closed her eyes, and focused again. Ahsoka focused with her, mentally asking permission to enter.

Slowly, a stone door in the temple's side ground open. It came to a halt about halfway open, the rest of its mechanisms having decayed too far to work anymore. Gentle lights blinked on in the room beyond, a kind of rotunda in blue-gray stone limned with green, shaped in the gentle curves the Jedi Order had loved, ankle-deep in water and overgrown here and there with algae. Ahsoka motioned to Leia, and the two of them sloshed their way in.

Ahsoka had explored many ruined temples before, most of them ruined long before the Jedi Purge, but she always felt a particular clog of emotion when she looked at them. There had been something _here_ once, something beautiful and good, something so many people believed in. Something gone forever.

And she was starting to feel something else. Something ominous. Ahsoka drew in her shields tighter, removing even the parts of herself and Leia that she'd had to make visible to get in here.

A crab scuttled by in the corner, casting a huge shadow in the dim, slanted light.

"So - why this place?" said Leia, looking around at it critically. "If there are hundreds of ruins like these, couldn't we have picked a drier one?"

"There are legends about the Naboo temple," said Ahsoka. "They say there used to be a Sith temple here." Leia shot her a sharp, alarmed look, and she continued quickly. "That's not uncommon. The Jedi used to build on top of Sith temples frequently. The Sith would build in a place of power, and they would harness that power for the Dark Side. Then the Jedi would find it, get rid of the Sith, and rededicate the space. Cleanse it, the way I do with my lightsabers. But what I've heard, just in fragments, is that this temple was different. When the Jedi found this temple, thousands of years ago, they didn't only convert the physical space to the Light Side. They converted the Sith."

Leia arched her eyebrows skeptically. "Just in fragments, huh."

"It's a legend," Ahsoka agreed. "I don't know if it's true." She started walking, looking around at the walls. This place was old, and there wasn't much in this topmost room. Just old inscriptions with aphorisms about the light, meditative patterns, broken shelves that no longer held anything. The floor was uneven, carved into a pattern she couldn't quite discern below the mats of slippery weeds that had grown overtop of it "But if we can find evidence-"

She stopped, as the creeping feeling rose up too loud and too strong to be ignored.

Dark Siders felt a certain way. Each one was different, but their presence was something palpable, putrid and hateful and cold. Very few of them, really only Palpatine, could have shielded themselves well enough to disguise it. And the reverse was true. This close, a Dark Sider's aura would make itself known even through the heaviest mental defenses Ahsoka knew how to build.

But nobody else's presence felt quite like Darth Vader's.

She hadn't felt it this close since Malachor, and that sensory memory had faded a little in the years since then - too mixed up with her own remembered fear and pain to be trusted. But Anakin's presence had always been stronger than anyone else's. And once he'd turned to the Dark Side it had also been _darker_ than anyone's, even the Inquisitors. A normal Dark Sider felt like evil ice that hated her. Vader, though... he felt like a black hole. Absolute zero. Even now that he'd broken free from Palpatine. Even now that she knew who he was.

And he was coming closer, intent on _her._

She should have remembered that about Vader, too. He didn't have a reason to hunt Light Siders anymore. The flickering of a Light Side stranger, halfway across the planet from him, wouldn't have been a concern. But Ahsoka wasn't just any Light Sider. And Anakin, even on the Light Side, had never been able to let people go.

"Hide," said Ahsoka in a tight voice. "I made a mistake."

"What-?" said Leia, but she didn't argue too hard. She felt it, too.

Ahsoka cast around quickly for exits. There weren't any, as far as she could tell. Just a few narrow passageways twisting deeper into the temple, and the underwater arch they'd come in by. Vader was already too close. He was practically at the mouth of the cavern.

"Stay behind me," she said, stepping between Leia and the door. Her hand went to the saber at her belt, but she kept it holstered, for now.

She could feel more than see Leia bristle. "I can fight-"

" _Stay back._ "

Ahsoka had wanted to prove to Leia that people like Anakin could change. Something about him _was_ changing - she hoped. She prayed. She wanted it to be true.

But she hadn't meant to bet their lives on it.

And nothing could save them if she'd happened to be wrong.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Anakin confronts Ahsoka, Leia confronts Luke, and everything is very, very awkward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> annnnnd we have a projected # of chapters, yay!
> 
> not really a warning per se, but if you are upset by Jedi Order Discourse there will be some of that here in Anakin and Ashoka's conversation. we'll try to keep it to a minimum going forward, though.

Dr. Aphra was deep underwater and nestled between a couple of big rock walls, somewhere down in the temple's lower levels, prising open what looked like a window.

She'd seen the big door that led into this place, but it had been shut, and she'd ignored it. There were only two reasons to go into a place like this through the front door. Either you were undercover pretending to be someone who belonged there, or you were deliberately messing with someone's head. Since nobody had lived or belonged in this temple for thousands of years, it was better to sneak.

There was a complicated locking mechanism here, connected to a set of wards Aphra couldn't quite see - a Force system she could only make educated guesses about based on how other kinds of intrusion detection worked. She'd positioned herself to stay out of the area it was _probably_ scanning, and that seemed to have worked so far. Assuming that the wards were even operational any longer. But usually, in Aphra's experience, the second she stopped believing a defense was operational was the second it got her.

The lock itself looked pretty standard, hinges and tumblers and stuff, and Aphra was making good progress at prising it open. The window looked like it would creak outward once the lock was released, casement-style, giving her just enough room to slip inside to a room that looked _very_ promising, vis-a-vis possibly having valuable relics inside.

With her best and longest lockpick, she started to ease the last of the tumblers open. She allllllmost had it...

*

Ahsoka watched, her white sabers raised and crossed in front of her, as Emperor Vader sloshed through the ankle-deep water into the rotunda, stepping out of the shadows into the dim, slanted light.

He looked the same as he had last time. That awful suit of armor with its life-support lights and its death's-head mask. The heavy rasp of artificial breath. The aura around him, an unfathomable burning cold that almost crossed back over into flame. The aura almost did feel a little bit different than before, but Ahsoka couldn't swear her memories were accurate. Had something really changed, or was she only looking at him differently, now that she understood that he was Anakin, now that she knew he was at least trying for some kind of peace? It was still mostly a Dark Side aura, either way. It still could never have been mistaken for anything else.

Next to him, wide-eyed and nervous, stood Luke Skywalker.

Ahsoka knew who Luke was, and she'd watched the holo of him giving his speech, but she'd never seen him face to face before. She'd never felt his aura in the Force beside his father's. Luke was wearing a set of formal clothes, black and lacy and severe like something humans wore for mourning, but they were all a bit worse for wear now that he'd swum underwater into a grotto while wearing them. His hair and his half-cape dripped copiously and he made squishing noises, over and above the usual splash of walking here, when he moved. Luke's presence felt diffuse and unfocused, in the way that most untrained Force-sensitives did, but it was _bright._ As strong as Leia's. If he'd fully been trained the way Jedi in the old Order were trained, he'd have been a light too brilliant to look at. He'd have filled the room as overwhelmingly as his father.

As it was, Luke felt like a faraway star cluster, big and faint and glimmering. His presence was connected to his father's, and Ahsoka couldn't quite focus on that connection, couldn't work out who it was that had the upper hand in the eye-crossing, light-and-dark border between them.

She took all this in, from behind her crossed sabers, as Emperor Vader paused before her. He did not reach for his own saber. She could sense turmoil in his mind - so much that she couldn't untangle it. But she recognized him. Even in this awful form, just as she had on Malachor, she felt the broken remnants of her own old bond with Anakin.

Abruptly, Vader sank to his knees, splashing down in the shallow, dirty water.

"Ahsoka," he said, in a deep voice choked with emotion. Not Anakin's voice, not the way she'd heard it when his mask was broken. But close enough.

She took a long, deep breath. In. Out. It was harder than she'd expected to control her fear.

"Anakin?" she said, quietly. "Do I get to call you that now?" The last time she'd tried, he'd tried to kill her.

"Yes," he said, almost too quickly, like he hadn't heard the question. "You are alive. This... is real."

Ahsoka frowned slightly. She lowered the sabers one inch. "No thanks to you. If I put these down, are you going to attack anyone?"

She noticed as he cast a long, resentful look at Leia, but he shook his head. "We have a truce. I will not attack unless she does."

Ahsoka could feel Leia behind glaring daggers at Anakin, mentally daring him to classify that as an attack, but he ignored her. Slowly, Ahsoka thumbed the off switch on both of her sabers and lowered them to her waist. She couldn't quite bring herself to holster them yet. She wasn't completely convinced that the danger was over.

"Father?" said Luke, who looked very confused. "Who's this?"

Anakin sloshed heavily to his feet and made a sweeping gesture in the dim light, as if he was formally introducing them. "This is Ahsoka Tano. My Padawan."

Luke looked about as confused as before, but he waved. "Hey, nice to meet you, Ahsoka. What's a Padawan?"

"I will explain in a moment," said Anakin, before Ahsoka or Leia could answer. He took another step towards Ahsoka, his arms out hesitantly as if he thought he might embrace her, or shake her hand, or high-five her or something and wasn't completely sure which of those he could do. He clearly only had room in his mind for her, at the moment, and not for the task of explaining her. "How did you survive?"

"On Malachor?" Ahsoka took a small step back, just enough to get the message across. She wasn't ready to hug this all out. "Long story. There was a time portal all of a sudden. You don't want to hear about it."

"A _time_ portal?" said Anakin.

She shook her head. "I slipped away at the last second. But you-" Ahsoka felt her throat closing, not from any Force attack but from sheer emotion. "What happened to _you,_ Anakin? Ever since Malachor I haven't been able to stop asking. We all believed in you so much. We thought you were the best of us. What _happened?_ "

"I fell," said Anakin simply, looking down.

Ahsoka gave him an impatient, _that-doesn't-narrow-it-down_ look.

"I made the wrong choices," he said, seeming to struggle for words. "It is too late to take them back. But I do not wish to make them again. I will tell you more, later. This is not the time."

"If there is a later." Ahsoka pointed one of her sabers at him, hilt-end first, accusingly. "I want to know why you chased me all the way here."

"I sensed your presence," said Anakin, as if that was all the explanation needed. He pointed a finger at her accusingly; she could feel that those words about _opposite sides_ had stung him. "Are you training _Princess Leia?_ "

"Yes," Ahsoka said tightly.

"Yes," said Leia at the same time, defiant.

"What?!" said Luke, behind Anakin, and Ahsoka belatedly remembered that Luke didn't know Leia was Force-sensitive. His father had kidnapped him before either of them figured that out.

AndAnakin didn't know that Leia was his daughter. Now that he was here it was possible he might read it out of one of their minds, but it would be  _much_ better for everyone if he never did. Ahsoka kept her mind carefully neutral, focused on the present world around her and not on the rest of what she knew. "She's very strong in the Force. As you'd know. With Luke gone, the only reasonable option was to train her."

"You have terrible taste in Padawans," Anakin said, stalking halfway around her to get a better look.

"I'll take your disapproval as a compliment," said Leia; her hand still rested warily on the hilt of her own saber. Her nostrils flared. "Besides, it's not like there was much choice. Maybe there would have been a better candidate if your Empire hadn't murdered them all."

" _Is_ she a Padawan?" Anakin turned back to Ahsoka.

She shook her head. "I'm not a Jedi Master. I don't have the right to claim a Padawan. I wish I did. But all I can do is pass on what I've learned the best I can."

"You will have difficulty reining in a temper like hers." Anakin's voice was sourly amused. "Have you told her yet that anger belongs to the Dark Side?"

That was not exactly what the Jedi had taught her about anger, in Ahsoka's opinion, but Anakin had always taken it that way. He'd always struggled to control his emotions, and he'd resented the way the Jedi talked about it, like it was a moral failing for him to feel afraid or annoyed or to get attached to his friends. She remembered how he'd talked about that, even before he fell. He'd so often felt that the Jedi punished him for no reason, refused to understand his point of view. Was that why it had all happened? Was that why joining the Sith had felt like a better option?

She had no sympathy, if that was what it was. She'd felt sympathy at the time, back when she was Snips and he was Skyguy and he seemed like a man who could do no wrong. A lot of the time, she'd thought he had good reasons to complain. But there was a big damn difference between complaining and genocide.

"I've told her that we control our anger," said Ahsoka, controlling her own with a bit of effort. "That a Jedi's powers are meant for protection, not destruction. It's natural to feel angry when we've been wronged. But it's what we do with that feeling that matters."

"The Jedi did not use their powers to _protect_ you." Anakin took a step towards her, genuinely angry now, and it took an effort to stand her ground without showing fear. "You know that. They betrayed you. They cast you out for a crime that you never committed. They tore you away from me. Yet you cleave so closely now to the worst of their teachings. As if that could bring them back."

Ahsoka raised one of her sabers and pointed the hilt up at Anakin's face. She could feel both Luke and Leia goggling quietly - they didn't know this story. But she couldn't spare any attention for them now. "Just because these are turned off does _not_ mean we're friends," she said, keeping her eyes on Anakin. "The Jedi made mistakes. They made them in a war _your_ master started, under pressure from _your_ master and _your_ boyfriend who still rules the galaxy with you. And maybe if they were still alive, I'd have the luxury of taking my time and deciding when they'd earned my forgiveness. If not for you."

Anakin regarded her for a long, tense moment, his awful mechanical breath going audibly in and out. She was angry. _He_ was angry, and she'd let him _make_ her angry. If one of them was going to step back and be a grown-up about that, it would have to be her.

She took a long breath of her own, purposely at odds with the rhythm of Anakin's respirator. As she let it out, she lowered her saber again. Placed it, deliberately, back onto her belt where it belonged.

"Besides," she said, as calmly as if they were talking about the weather. "Leia's good. I like her."

*

Luke kept half an ear on his father's argument with this Ahsoka person. She was fascinating-looking, with those big montrals and lekku and the geometric markings on her face. And _two_ white lightsabers; he'd never seen anyone wielding two at once! She clearly had some history with Anakin, and Luke _really_ wanted to know about that, even though he still didn't know what a Padawan was. But right now she looked pretty intent on having an argument about things Luke didn't understand, and it was hard to concentrate on making sense of it all when Leia was also right there.

He had missed Leia so much, even more than his other friends. Ever since he first saw her in that grainy little hologram, she'd been special to him in a way that he couldn't explain. Like he'd known her forever.

He remembered how she'd screamed his name in protest when Vader - still Vader, and not Anakin, at that point - kidnapped him from a Rebel field training exercise. He remembered how she'd been ready to die, to let the whole group of them die, instead of letting him go. He remembered how he'd kissed her cheek for luck, knowing luck wouldn't be enough. Wanting her to trust him when he made that gamble, risking his own life for the sake of all the other Rebels. Knowing she wouldn't.

But now she had a lightsaber! This Ahsoka person was training her to use the Force. He had never realized Leia was Force-sensitive. She must not have known either - she wouldn't have kept it a secret from him on purpose.

Anakin had been very reluctant to teach Luke anything about the Force. If Ahsoka was any good, Leia might know more about the Force now than Luke did.

He _really_ hoped she wasn't too mad at him.

Luke sloshed through the shallow water in a careful semicircle, wishing he had a better pair of boots. He was still wearing what he'd worn to Padmé and Palpatine's memorials - Anakin had stopped long enough to buy him a breathing mask, but nothing else. Formal Imperial boots were sturdy enough to navigate the slippery, weed-choked, water-covered floor, but not waterproof enough to keep his feet dry. Luke _squelched_ when he moved. He probably looked super gross.

But he knew that wasn't the real reason why Leia glared at him, sharp and suspicious, as he approached her.

"Leia," he said, half-pleading.

She reluctantly tore her attention from the two older Force users and turned to him. Leia didn't look squelchy or half-drowned. She'd put on an elegant white wet suit, and she'd braided her hair carefully before tucking it up under a swimming cap. She looked like she could swim around all day, as comfortable as a mermaid.

"Your Highness," she said acidly.

"I'm so happy to see you," Luke said earnestly. He didn't know what else to say.

"What, after you _renounced the Rebel cause?_ " she practically snarled. "After you disowned us all in front of the entire galaxy and called us stupid and in thrall to our fear? After you blamed _us_ for all the deaths in this war?"

"I had to say that!" Luke protested. "It's how I got them to agree to the truce. I didn't _mean_ it. I said it to save you." But his gut twisted with guilt, because he knew it wasn't that simple.

"I know." Leia's lip was trembling. "I know that's what you thought. But it was _stupid._ "

Luke took another couple of sloshing steps toward her, and she backed away, barely even looking where she was going.

And then there was a rumble.

*

There!

Sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth under the breath mask, Aphra jimmied the last bits of the underwater lock into place. The window made the telltale, tiny creak of something old and heavy, suddenly loosened.

Now she just had to get through it without setting off any magic Jedi alarms.

Aphra couldn't see the Force, of course. She just had to visualize where the lasers or whatever would be if this was a normal ancient ruin. Slowly, picturing all that geometrical stuff in her mind and moving soooo carefully into the gaps between it, she put out a hand to the window. She started to ease it open, bit by bit. One inch outward. Two inches. Three...

There was a sudden rumble.

*

Anakin could hardly think. He had wanted this - there was nothing else he could have wanted, after sensing Ahsoka's presence, but to see for himself that she was alive. But he had not been prepared for it. He had fallen to his knees, but a little gesture like that wasn't going to wash away everything that had happened. Everyone else they'd both lost.

The last time he'd seen Ahsoka, on Malachor, they'd been enemies. They'd fought. Partway through the fight, as she heard his unmodulated voice through his broken mask, she had realized who he was. She'd tried to stop fighting.

 _I won't leave you,_ she'd said. _Not this time._

But he'd known it was a lie. And he'd kept on fighting. And she'd... left. (Through a time portal, apparently, whatever that meant. He was going to have to figure that out some other time.)

Years later, after Palpatine was gone, Anakin's medical droid had asked him about his feelings of guilt. _Moral injury,_ she'd called it, like Anakin's conscience was an arm to be broken or a windpipe to crush. She'd asked if he could imagine confessing his sins and apologizing to anyone, even an imaginary person - an imaginary version, maybe, of one of his old lost friends.

He had imagined Ahsoka, and he had immediately lashed out.

 _They would never take me back,_ he'd said. _Not even if they lived._

And now here she was. They weren't fighting now, not for real, but he'd been right; she wasn't taking him back. She wasn't going to stay. And he knew - he _knew_ \- it wasn't even fair to want her to.

But he could at least avoid fucking it up worse. That was what he was here for, wasn't it? Palpatine was gone, and that meant Anakin got to stop hurting people.

So as he watched Ahsoka taking deep breaths, calming herself, refusing to escalate further, he followed her lead. It hurt, it didn't feel natural not to follow his anger, but Anakin was used to being an unnatural thing. He took a step back.

She looked at him carefully, assessing. Luke and Princess Leia were having their own argument off to the side, but Anakin couldn't focus on it. He could sense enough to know that Luke wasn't in any danger, except maybe of having his feelings hurt. That had to be enough.

"What about you?" Ahsoka asked at last, more softly. The anger had gone out of her, replaced by something heavy and sad. "You're training Luke?"

"No," Anakin said, a little too sharply. Training Luke was one of the things he had tried his hardest _not_ to do. Anakin was the Sith master now, since he'd killed Palpatine fair and square. But to train Luke, in the specific way that Sith were trained, would mean subjecting him to horrors beyond imagining.

"But you're bonded to him." Her voice was low - probably too low for Luke to hear, distracted as he was. "The way a master is bonded. I can feel that."

"He is my son. That is what made the bond, not any training. I am all the Sith, and their line will end with me. My son will find his own way."

Ahsoka looked at him dubiously in the gloom. "You do still feel like a Sith Lord. You know that, don't you? The dark, the cold - that's all still there."

Anakin frowned behind his mask. He did know, though he hadn't thought about it much. He was aware what Sith Lords felt like in the Force.

But before he could answer, there was a sudden rumble.

 _Intruders,_ said something, old and staticky, seeming to come from the walls of the temple. Not into the air, but into the Force itself. _Intruders._

Anakin looked up. The temple's very structure seemed to creak and groan, old mechanisms straining to function as they would have when the building was working and whole, coming up short against the parts that were half-collapsed, partly buried, broken or unintentionally underwater. The walls shuddered, one of them beginning to dangerously tilt, and the corners of the floor began to crumble.

He had just enough time to throw out his hand and summon a Force barrier, big enough to protect himself and Ahsoka and Luke. He felt the tilting wall come down hard against that barrier, weighing on it, held up only by the power of his mind. Anakin was strong enough for that. But all of his mind, for that split second, was focused on repelling that very solid threat. He was not fast enough to also stop the dark wall of water that came from nowhere, slammed into all four of them with the weight of an ocean, and swallowed them up.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Anakin gets stuck in an underwater ruin with one of his least favorite people, has a very awkward personal conversation, and is dismayed to discover that ghosts exist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you didn't like the very sad theme song from a few chapters ago, then Taxxxon suggests [this silly song instead](https://soundcloud.com/sonicemporiumonred/underwater-temple-underwater-monk)

The water hit Leia like a speeder accident, and she tumbled off her feet. It had been ankle-deep and placid in here before, but now it was a crushing current moving faster than she could track, up above her head, as the walls of the temple creaked, broke, and smashed together above her.

_Intruder,_ said the temple loudly in her head. _Intruder_ \- but she had the distinct feeling that it didn't know what to do beyond that, didn't have a real consciousness left besides the ability to make this alarm go off. All it could do was flail in the direction of a defensive mechanism it had once possessed, moving the walls and floors in what should have been a complicated misdirecting or entrapping pattern, but which now only made the temple break itself as water for some unknown purpose roared through.

Leia couldn't swim hard enough or think fast enough to get her bearings. Everything was just pitch darkness, the roar of water and stone, the vertigo of motion, and the acute awareness that it would only take one misdirected current, one stone floor cracking in the wrong place, to crush her like a bug. At least she hadn't taken off her breath mask in the upper room - if she had, she'd be dead already.

At last she crashed into something uneven - hard enough to drive her breath out into the mask, but not hard enough to crush her - and as she reeled, the current eased. She waited a couple of seconds, catching her breath again, as the water slowed back to something close to stillness and the temple stopped shouting the word _Intruder_ into her head.

It was still too dark to see clearly, but she saw a couple of little colored lights, heavily diffracted. Everything else was a black blur, and the sound in her ears was only the roar of the ocean, combined with some other soft inorganic sound that she couldn't place at first.

Leia slowed her breath, forcing something like calm back into her bruised limbs, and then she reached up and turned on her suit's headlamp.

The lamp revealed a curve of crumbled stone, uncomfortably low and close. This was some chamber that had halfway collapsed many years ago, and she'd been dragged into one of its corners. When she turned her head the other way, she saw the remains of a reasonably sized room, all under water and very broken, but at least part of its ceiling still held. It looked different from the room she'd been in a moment ago - not just in worse repair, but designed differently, runes in an unfamiliar alphabet on the walls, odd jagged shapes carved in, little accents in _red_ everywhere. Little wormlike fish shivered in the current at the edges of the room, disturbed by the great shift that had just taken place. And there was a muddled dark shape, crumpled on the floor at the other side of the room-

She suppressed a gasp.

She recognized that shape. It was Darth Vader, suit and all, lying there stunned. Not drowning, probably - she recognized that sound now, the rasp of his respirator, distorted by the water but still steadily working. It must have automatically switched to a rebreather setting when it detected water. The tiny lights she'd seen, diffracted in the gloom, were the lights of Vader's life support.

Leia didn't see any sign of Ahsoka or Luke. Just Vader. Her gut told her that the others were alive, but she was on her own.

She looked down, for a long moment, at Vader's crumpled form. Her hand crept, almost without conscious volition, to the hilt of her lightsaber.

Anger was the Dark Side, et cetera, et cetera. But Leia had _so_ many reasons to be angry. She'd dreamed of this so many times since Alderaan - it had become a literal recurring dream, one that she'd had to confess to Ahsoka about more than once. Seeing Vader lying in pain at her feet. Hurting him. There were so many ways, in her dream, that she could hurt him.

If he was unconscious or too stunned to react, she could hurt him now. It would be a net good for the galaxy, wouldn't it? Slaying a monster.

Even a monster who was technically her father.

As she hesitated, Vader stirred, and she quickly removed her hand from the saber. He wobbled slightly as he stood, whether from pain or from the strange sensation of being in water now, but she didn't see any significant damage. Leia was buoyant enough that gravity didn't hold her to the floor here; she floated roughly in the middle of the room. Vader was heavier, and his weight anchored him, but the ceiling wasn't high enough for him to straighten all the way.

He hunched over, looked around, and fixed Leia with a baleful look.

"Believe me," she said, "I'm not happy to be here with you either."

Her voice was muffled, but it carried through the water. Vader's deep voice was just this side of intelligible as he replied. "Do you even understand where you are?"

"Clearly I'm in the basement of some flooded Jedi temple with a limbless mass murderer. And I'm going to get back out." Leia frowned, thinking this through a little further. Vader had been a Jedi, and then he'd been a killer who specialized in hunting down Jedi. He might know as much about this place as Ahsoka did, or more. "Do you know the way out? Have you been here before?"

"No." Vader looked her sullenly up and down, the gears seeming to turn in his own mind. "Why were you here? With Ahsoka. Why here, and not a place in better repair?"

"There's a legend about this Jedi temple specifically. I take it you don't know it?"

"You are mistaken." Vader turned to look at that red writing on the walls. "This is not a Jedi temple."

"What?"

"These words are written in the language of the Sith."

Leia's skin, below the wet suit, crawled. She swung her head in that direction and the headlamp illuminated the letters starkly, angular red etchings on a corroded stone surface that might once have been white. "They didn't have these in the entrance room. We're in a Sith part of the temple?"

"Evidently." Vader motioned, and he started to walk away, still crouched to fit his helmeted head under the low ceiling, with a strange, buoyant, underwater gait. "This way. We should not tarry here."

Leia swam after him, incensed with both of them. Surely Ahsoka couldn't have made a mistake _this_ big. "Ahsoka said this used to be a Sith temple, but it wasn't one anymore. The Jedi reformed it. You're saying it still _is_ a Sith temple?"

There was a dark amusement in Vader's voice, but he did not break his stride. "The Jedi reformed many temples, according to the Jedi. But the Dark Side is not so easily snuffed out. Most often, the Jedi could not destroy such a temple; instead, they built a temple of their own on top. They buried the darkness, suppressed it and slowly twisted its emanations back to the light. Even the Jedi themselves, centuries later, forgot what lay beneath them. But for those with eyes to see, the Dark Side remains."

Leia made a face under her mask. Was this the answer to the question she'd been asking? Ahsoka thought the Sith from this temple had been redeemed, but maybe they hadn't at all, and neither had the temple. They'd just sat there wearing a Light Side disguise.

"Wait," she said as she caught up to him. They must look ridiculous - her floating in the gloom of the corridor, kicking forward with the flippers of her wet suit, him plodding forward on his feet. "Why am I following you? I _don't_ trust you to know the way out of here."

"You need not follow me. I could leave you here to find your own way, or to run out of air and perish. But I will not harm you if you follow. My son would not appreciate it. Nor would my Padawan."

For some reason, that stung. It struck Leia, in a new way, that this was her father. He'd brought her into the world. But even now, after everything he'd done, even insisting to the world that he was less evil now, the only reason he gave two shits about her existence was because Luke did.

"You _don't_ know the way out of here," she accused. "Do you?"

"No. But I know something about Sith temples. Follow me or not."

He swept away, his cape billowing behind him in the slight current. Leia made another face, and then she looked around - at the half-collapsed corridor. At the writing that she didn't understand. At the fact that there wasn't really another direction to go, anyway.

She followed.

*

The light from Princess Leia's headlamp swung erratically back and forth in Anakin's vision as she swam behind him, spotlighting different parts of the walls. Things lived down here - nothing large, as far as Anakin could see, but the crevices had been colonized by little molluscs, pale crustaceans with limbs like dental floss, rafts of barnacles. In truth, he didn't need the headlamp to see them. His own mask's lenses knew how to adjust to the dark. Soon enough, the level of rubble on the floor lowered, and the ceiling rose, and he was able to walk without painfully hunching again.

This had once been a Sith temple, but it was broken. Of the darkness that must once have suffused this place, only the faintest wisps remained. Most of the Sith's power here had long ago been siphoned off by the Jedi structure that caged it, bled away harmlessly or transmuted into light, and most of the rest had lost its strength as the physical structure slowly disintegrated.

But there was something _else._

Long after the Sith had been buried, long after the building had crumbled into the sea, another form of darkness had visited here. A recent one, if Anakin sensed it correctly - something within the past century. It had not been enough to reverse what the Jedi did, to turn the whole place back into a Sith place. But it had left its mark. It had made changes.

Anakin had a bad feeling about it.

Leia followed him in sullen silence, which was fine with him. The corridor opened out a little wider, and soon they came to a section of wall so thoroughly collapsed that it gaped open, a pile of rocks and rubble lying below a gash wide enough for Anakin's bulk to enter.

Anakin peered into the open space. It was not, alas, a route out into the open water. But it led _up_ \- there was a short chimney that he could probably squeeze through, and above it, faintly visible, a wider space.

"This way," he said, maneuvering himself into the gap. The bulk of his suit made this a less graceful endeavor than it might otherwise have been, and there was a moderate downward current through the narrow space. With the water impeding his movements, Anakin could not trust his instincts to land him in the right place if he leapt. He could make the climb, though. It was just going to... take a few minutes.

Leia looked at him skeptically, treading water. "Why are you going in there? There's plenty of corridor left."

"Yes. Perhaps even a way out. But the intended route through a Sith temple is never pleasant, even for Sith." He had managed to wedge himself entirely into the chimney, and he reached forwards for handholds that would support his weight under the water. Fortunately, the walls were very uneven, made of large, piled, fallen stones. "This goes _up,_ which is the direction we need. Follow me or not."

She paused longer at least, floating next to the hole in the wall while he got his bearings. It was slow going, as he tested a handhold and foothold and hoisted himself up. His armored shoulders clunked as they came up against the rocks. Anakin couldn't shrug or twist his armored shoulders in the ways that a normal person could. He awkwardly rotated his whole body from the waist, and made a few more false starts before he found an angle at which he could successfully push through.

"Why not just use the Force and move the rocks?" said Leia, but she hadn't done that either.

"They may be load-bearing rocks." Or they might still be connected to one of the temple's mechanisms, and who knew how far they would fall the next time the temple detected an intruder. Let alone what would happen to Ahsoka and Luke.

Leia stayed silent as he climbed about halfway up, almost high enough to see over the lip of the chasm.

"Why did Ahsoka bring you here?" he asked at last. "You said there is a legend. What did you think would be here that you needed?"

He felt, more than saw, Leia cross her arms. "Why do you think I'd tell you?"

"Answer me or not. I am... curious."

Leia seemed to weigh her options, and then decide that answering would be less unpleasant than floating around, watching Anakin climb in awkward silence. "I was asking her about the Jedi and the Sith. About whether it's possible for a Sith to turn back to the Light Side. Luke seems to think so, but I'm not convinced."

Strange, if that was the truth. It felt mostly true. But Anakin would have thought that a Rebel Princess would have larger concerns.

There was something strange about Leia's mind right now. Anakin couldn't put his finger yet on what it was or what it meant. She'd hated him already, for several very good reasons, and the feeling was mutual. He couldn't have changed it even if he'd wanted to. But today her hate seemed different from before. Somehow not only more uncertain but more personal.

The last time Anakin had seen Princess Leia Organa, it had been just after he tortured her and stood by while her planet blew up. Yet her hate for him, though bright and strong, still hadn't felt personal in this way. What could be more personal than all of _that?_

"And Ahsoka thought this temple would have an answer?" he asked, instead of addressing any of that.

"The legends say this place is different from the others. The Jedi didn't only defeat the Sith and cleanse the area. They reformed the Sith Lords. The people." Ledi crossed her arms, quietly seething in a way that she kept from creeping into her voice. "But obviously someone made that up, if there's still an entire Sith complex down here. Or the Sith Lords could have lied. I hear they're good at that."

"That they are," Anakin sourly agreed.

He hauled himself up over the lip of the chasm, past some bivalves that had inconveniently attached themselves to its edge, and into the upper room. This legend was probably false, but it intrigued him. Not that he wanted to be a Jedi again, far from it, but the idea of tangible proof that a Sith Lord could change... that was... comforting.

This room was not as large as he'd originally thought, but the damage was not as bad as on the floor below. It was also no longer a Sith room. The walls, though badly damaged and infested with sea invertebrates, bore the gentle curves of classic Jedi design. It did not look like a room that had been richly decorated even when it was whole. A storage room, maybe, buried under both the earth and the water. There had once been two doors leading out, but one of them was blocked by rubble, leaving a single, long, darkened path which might or might not lead to any escape.

Leia wasted no time in maneuvering herself into the space and beginning to pull her own way up. Her body was smaller and more flexible than Anakin's, but there was still that downward current, too insistent to easily swim agasint. She had to use the handholds to pull herself up, in a less effortful, more buoyant, but also less well-anchored movement than Anakin's.

There was still something missing from her story, and it was none of Anakin's business, but it nagged at him.

"You came here for Luke's sake," he guessed. "You would not have cared about the legends otherwise. But you want to know if Luke is correct. You have feelings for him."

As soon as he said that last part, he knew it was not true. It was both uncomfortably close to the truth and completely wrong. He could also feel a defensive wall slam up in her mind, an irritation even more profound than what had come before, as she glared up at him.

Anakin knew he could not press further, not with Leia Organa. He remembered how difficult it had been to get any information out of her last time. By her standards, she had made polite conversation so far, but she wasn't going to answer any question she didn't want to answer. Not even if he tried to drag the answers out of her head. Not even if she screamed-

It was pointless to think of such things.

"Never mind," he said, turning away. "I will not ask."

He felt her pause a second longer before she grabbed at the handholds, even more fiercely than before, and started to climb again.

Anakin knew exactly why Leia hated him. In truth, he was surprised she'd tolerated him even enough to follow him this far, even when their lives might depend on it. He had not even thought about apologizing for what he'd done to her before, because the harm was too large for any apology to ever matter. If he had the measure of her correctly, she would be insulted that he'd tried.

Besides, Leia _irritated_ him.

"Ouch," Leia said presently, more to herself than to him, and he turned. She'd scratched her finger grabbing on to one of the shells at the edge of the chasm. Vader's gloves were thickly armored, and his mechanical hands didn't bleed anyway, but the wetsuit material protecting Leia's hands was thinner. She had brought her hand instinctively to her mouth. It wasn't a bad cut, but the bright light of her head lamp highlighted a tiny drop of blood, diffusing into the salty water.

She was in no danger from the cut itself. But blood in the sea had a tendency to... attract creatures.

Leia scowled, yanked the glove's material down to cover her fingertip, and quickly kicked the last few feet up. "I'm fine," she said, although Anakin had said nothing. "And, for your information, Luke is my friend. I don't suppose you're human enough to know what it's like to lose a _friend._ "

Anakin had the strangest feeling that _friend_ wasn't quite right, either. It was closer than what he'd initially supposed. But it was not quite the truth.

He started to quickly walk out of the room, and Leia doggedly swam after him. Not that he couldn't deal with any hungry sea-beasts who arrived, but it would be annoying to have to. "Do you know the Jedi Order's teachings on attachment and loss? They would say that you ought not to cling to a _friend._ That you should accept that such people will come and go, and you are powerless to stop it. It is the will of the Force. I think you will not like those teachings, Princess."

"I'll take my teachings about the Jedi from someone who still acts like one," Leia shot back.

"Ahsoka is no Jedi. She clings to their memory because she cannot bear their loss. She is no more objective than I am. No _objective_ witness to the Order remains." Which was one of the reasons why Anakin had been leery about the memorial. Luke wasn't objective either, but at least he was coming to the project with fresh eyes, without a complicated history of his own.

Leia kicked harder and quickly swam in front of him. He could feel the annoyance she'd radiated ever since they fell down here, crystallizing into something sharp and vindictive.

"You don't know anything, do you?" she said. "We have plenty of witnesses. We have the _ghosts._ "

Anakin stopped still. "What?"

"The ghosts."

He waved a hand, trying to motion her aside. "There are no ghosts. Ghosts do not exist."

Shortly after he'd killed Palpatine, Anakin had been haunted by what he'd assumed, at first, was Palpatine's ghost. In fact, it had been no such thing - only a trauma-induced waking nightmare. His own mind wrestling with the question of how much of him had been shaped by his master, how much of him could be freed from that shaping, and how much of him could not. How, in several metaphorical ways, Palpatine's memory would always be with him. The ghost had been nothing but that knowledge made visible. If it had been more...

Well, he wouldn't be here talking to an annoying Rebel Princess.

He wouldn't be here at all.

Leia sounded more self-satisfied than ever. "Of course they do."

"Is _Ahsoka_ seeing ghosts?" Anakin demanded. He could hardly bear to imagine this. "Is she hallucinating-"

"No, of course she's not hallucinating. I've seen him, too."

"Him?"

"Obi-Wan Kenobi," Leia said smugly.

The water around Anakin began to ripple strangely.

He had _killed_ Obi-Wan. And yet... there had been a strangeness in the way Obi-Wan died. His body had vanished to nothing, leaving only a pile of robes on the floor. _Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine._

Anakin had killed Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan was _dead._

"No," said Anakin. It came out louder than he meant it to.

Leia was watching him carefully. She was, apparently, foolish enough to provoke him this way on purpose; but she had, at least, been wise enough to keep a certain distance. Her voice was cold now, disappointed. "You hated him that much?"

"The Jedi do not believe in a life after death," Anakin snarled. "The Jedi _would_ not believe in a life after death. The Jedi would _rather_ disappear after death, because it is the _will of the Force,_ because we are supposed to _accept_ it. That is what they _always_ said. You are wrong. Someone is _fooling_ you."

But he was shaking, and he could not seem to take another step forward through this stupid, waterlogged hallway. Leia, whether out of malice or fear or simple practicality, was already swimming away.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Leia angrily swims off on her own, discovers Sith runes, and has a disturbing vision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Note: There's a major character death in here, actually, but it's in a vision which is clearly (both to readers and to the person having the vision) not real. Nobody's dying for real in this fic! :P

Leia could find her own way out. She didn't want to spend another second at Vader's side. She'd known, when she brought up ghosts, that it would upset him - she didn't know _why,_ exactly, but she knew Obi-Wan had said it would. From the sound of it, it brought up one of his old grudges against the Jedi. Vader might think he wasn't evil anymore, but he still hated the people who were on the side of good. He could stew in that hate for a while before he followed her. He deserved it.

This corridor she was swimming through had once been a hallway, with various doors leading out into smaller rooms, but most of those doors were blocked off or broken, and the easiest way to go was straight ahead. She did that, letting her headlamp guide her through the gloom. The water was murky enough that she only saw about ten feet ahead, and sometimes obstacles loomed up in front of her suddenly, an overhang jutting down in front of her face or a fish darting past.

Once, an eel longer than she was peered up at her from behind a jagged boulder. It gave her a hungry stare, a second set of jaws emerging from behind its front teeth to clack menacingly as it tasted the water. Leia glared at it, and after a tense moment, it slunk back into the crevice from which it had emerged.

Eventually, the hallway opened out into a slightly larger area, another room where people might have come and gone. Several more hallways must have once branched out of this one, but only a couple were still accessible. Most tantalizingly, there was light in this room, something dim shining down from a crack in the ceiling. It was much duller than her headlamp, not nearly strong enough to be sunlight, but it might have been reflected from an artificial light in an upper room, one of the few pieces of ancient tech that still worked in this ruin.

Leia swam upward and pressed her hands to the crack, but it was less than a hand's breadth wide. She couldn't see anything useful through it either, just a vague wash of dimly-lit color that could have been another room like this one.

She looked back down. There were at least two ways out of here besides the way she'd come. Neither of them came with an obvious or immediate way up. There was also a dais in the centre of the room, just under the crack in the ceiling, the dim light filtering over its surface like a spotlight. From up here, Leia could see words on top of it. Jedi words, in the flowing script Ahsoka had been teaching her to read. When she turned her head to look at it, her headlamp threw the writing into a sharper, brighter relief.

It was almost legible this way. Not quite. _Balance,_ that was one of the words, which didn't surprise her - Ahsoka talked frequently about balance. _Waves,_ that was another...

She swam closer.

Before her eyes, the words swam and reformed.

Leia balked; she couldn't read these new words at all. They were strange and jagged, like the red words down in the Sith part of the temple. She had a bad feeling about them immediately.

Was this a part of how the temple worked? Was it all just a Sith temple, from top to bottom, masquerading as a temple for Jedi? Her instincts told her to run, but she wanted to _know._

Which was why she looked at the runes a second longer than she ought to have.

_My dear girl,_ said a voice suddenly in her head, from the runes' direction. _What are you looking for?_

There was something faintly familiar about that voice, but Leia couldn't place it. It sounded like a young man's voice, cultured and refined, but not quite a Core World accent. Maybe about her own age.

She could feel that it was not a person's voice. Not a person who was in the room with her, nor a person who was watching from afar. It was only a recording a person had made, maybe a long time ago. But it was aware of her on some rudimentary level, the way the temple had been aware of something coming into it that shouldn't have. It was a recording that could _do_ things.

"Who are you?" she said warily.

_You know that. Or you know enough._ Leia frowned, and the voice continued. _Come closer, dear girl. You are looking for answers. But do you think the Jedi have them? You already know they do not. The Jedi lie to themselves._

"Sure. And the Sith lie to other people on purpose. If that's the choice, I'll take my chances with the Jedi."

_If you like._ The voice was diffident and condescending. Whoever this was, Leia disliked him already, and not only because he was obviously a Sith Lord. _But think how the Jedi hold you back. Think of what you could do without them._

Leia had already turned to swim away. But she turned to look back, on impulse, because that last statement didn't make any sense. The Jedi were teaching her to be _more_ powerful, not less. It had been only a few weeks, and she was already stronger, closer to being able to fight someone like Vader for real, as a result of Ahsoka's teaching. What could Ahsoka possibly be holding her back from?

But now she'd thought that question. He'd made her think it.

And as she blinked curiously at the dais, for that single moment, a harsh reddish light burst from it and blotted out everything else in the room.

*

She'd had this dream so many times that, even as a waking vision, she recognized it immediately. Some part of her wanted to resist - whoever was bringing her own thoughts to life around her like this, they could not have her best interests at heart - but the dream had its own logic and its own inevitable sequence of events, and she couldn't do anything but watch them. She couldn't even want to do anything else.

Leia was not underwater. She was not in a ruin. She was in some room, black and gray and shining like all the important Imperial rooms, and her white lightsaber burned in her hand. She had it up against Emperor Tarkin's throat. She had him as a hostage, his body unwillingly shielding hers.

Vader was angry, of course. She could feel his anger like the wave of heat from an explosion. Vader might well still be stronger than her. But Leia knew how to hit him where he was weakest.

"Give him back _now,_ " Vader said, advancing on her, "and your death will be merciful. Rebel scum."

"I'm not scum," Leia calmly replied, twisting Tarkin's arm a little further behind him. "Haven't you figured it out by now? I'm your daughter."

Vader stopped in his tracks, perplexed. He would not believe it, not at first - it would take more than a single instant, Leia thought, for this to sink in. "What?"

Leia's lip curled. "You never even went to a doctor's appointment with Padmé, did you? She was pregnant with twins. _You_ weren't there when she died, but she wasn't alone - she had friends with her, friends from the Jedi and the Senate, friends who hadn't turned to the Dark Side. They separated us for our own protection. Obi-Wan Kenobi took one baby, a boy, out to the Lars homestead on Tatooine. Bail Organa took the other. I'm Luke's sister. I'm your daughter. And you tortured me."

She always felt like she ought to say even more, rant even longer. But there was no need. Vader crumpled immediately - he'd already searched his feelings, before she'd even finished speaking. He already knew it was true.

"No," he wailed.

Tarkin, still conscious if immobilized, spluttered. "This is ridiculous. Vader, is _everyone_ in the Rebel Alliance related to you-?!"

But Vader only shouted the same word louder.

"Now," said Leia when he was good and done. Her anger hadn't abated even a little. Maybe Vader could feel it now, a rage as strong as his own, only hers was a righteous rage, hers was about smiting the guilty and protecting the weak. Maybe he understood now why he'd hated her in particular. Why she, alone of all the Rebel sympathizers in the Senate, had felt like a match for him. "What do you think a father owes his daughter, _my lord?_ "

"Anything," Vader whimpered.

She didn't know why it was so easy for her to picture Darth Vader, of all people, brought so low so easily. In the real world, surely, it would be harder to crack him. Vader was so unsettlingly powerful, his face always hidden, seemingly unaffected by anything but the Empire's business. But in her dream it always happened like this, exactly this quick and exactly this complete. So she went with it. It wasn't like she didn't want to see him like this, blubbering, miserable.

She took him at his word. She asked for everything. She drew political concession after political concession from him, promise after promise, to Tarkin's increasingly livid dismay. She made him hand over the whole Empire to her, promise to go into exile, to face death, whatever she liked.

"Think of this _rationally,_ Vader," Tarkin protested, despite the burning saber that she held to his throat. "What if we didn't give the Princess everything she wants just because she's your relative. What if we _didn't_ hand over the galaxy to the Rebels-"

He was Vader's opposite. No matter what Leia did to him in her visions, he never really seemed to fold. But nobody else in the room was listening to Tarkin.

Until, at last, she couldn't think of anything else to ask for.

"Well," she said, stone-faced. "I think that's everything."

"It is everything," Vader agreed, in that obnoxiously deep voice. He still hadn't moved from the ground, but he lifted his face - that blank, black, deaths-head mask, giving away nothing. He could be crying under there, and she wouldn't know. "There is nothing left. This is all I can do. Will you give him back to me now, my daughter?"

Leia looked down at him, abject there on the floor.

She deliberately schooled her voice into something more refined, the mock-Core World accent she used when she was making fun of the Imperial brass.

"You're far too trusting," she said.

With a flick of her wrist, she drove the saber blade into Tarkin's neck and severed his head from his body.

She felt a strange, intoxicating rush of power, like cold fire in her veins - that was strange; that wasn't usually in the dream. But the sounds and images, apart from that, were familiar. Vader's howl of despair. Tarkin's ugly, craggy face, devoid of expression, as his head hit the black floor and rolled. The whole room beginning to shake and fall apart around them, as the rest of dream faded away to black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shortish chapter, but the next thing we're gonna do is a switch to Ahsoka's POV, which also necessitates rewinding a few minutes to when the temple washed everyone away, and that type of scene change *really* wasn't working in the middle of the chapter :P
> 
> the fish with the second set of jaws is [literally just a moray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_eel) I don't make the rules
> 
> more soon, I hope!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a bunch of backstory gets explained to Luke, who is _not_ dressed appropriately for an underwater adventure, and Ahsoka comes face to face with her own dark side.

_Intruders,_ said the temple, as Ahsoka stood in the upper room stood across from Anakin, waiting tensely for him to speak again.

As the rush of water knocked her off her feet, all she could do was trust herself to the Force. There was a roar and a blackness and an awful uncontrollable sense of motion. She twisted and kicked out as precisely and unthinkingly as she would have in a violent battle, letting her body react by instinct before her panicked mind could get in its way. Her hand caught a handhold, after a few moments, and she grabbed it and held on with all her strength.

Something else brushed her other hand, not a rock but something that felt alive, and she instinctively grabbed that, too. It was heavy, and she didn't have room in her head to concentrate on anything else for a while, just holding her own against the bruising onrush of water.

At last the current slowed. The water became still again, or still enough to ignore, and the temple's voice in her head faded. Only then did she let go of what her hands were holding, turn on her wet suit's headlamp, and let herself take a look around at where she was.

She was still in the ruined Jedi temple, underwater, though slabs of fallen wall and ceiling littered the floor. Two floors had merged into one here - and even the upper floor that she could see from here wasn't the entrance room where she'd started. They'd been washed much deeper into the temple complex than that, and there was no light besides the one she'd brought with her.

The thing she'd grabbed on to was an ornate carving at the side of the room, and beyond it was a sharp, uneven pile of fallen masonry. If she'd let herself be drawn by the current much further, instead of grabbing what she could, she'd have been dashed against those points. Maybe not fatally, but any injury constricting one's movement underwater, or damaging one's breathing apparatus... well, it would have been bad.

In her other hand, she had grabbed Luke Skywalker.

He floated next to her now, not fully unconscious but stunned. His clothes were uncomfortably tangled around him. Ahsoka didn't know what Anakin had been thinking, taking Luke in here dressed like this - not a practical wet suit like hers or Leia's, but what looked for all the world like formal Coruscanti mourning garb, or maybe semi-formal Naboo if you squinted. All shiny boots and black lace and an entire semi-sheer, black, embroidered cape, which was now twisted up forlornly and floating in the water. That cape was probably going to strangle him as soon as it caught on something. Anakin had clearly known that they'd have to go underwater to get in here - or if he hadn't known, he'd found out when he got to the island. He'd given his son a breath mask, at least, a black one that went with his outfit. But he hadn't provided any other adaptation to the environment whatsoever. And Luke hadn't thought to ask, or hadn't had the courage.

Ahsoka couldn't see Leia or Anakin anywhere. She could feel that they were alive, both tense in a way that wasn't pleasant to sense, but without any feeling of imminent danger. They must have washed into another part of the temple.

And when she extended her senses enough to feel them, now that she was down at this depth, she felt something... else. Something _wrong._

Luke stirred, mumbling something to himself, and Ahsoka maneuvered into his field of view - careful not to point the glare of the headlamp directly into his eyes. "Luke. Can you hear me?"

"Nngh. Yeah." Luke blinked his eyes open, coming back to awareness; they were blue the way Anakin's eyes had used to be. They focused on her adequately, and the pupils were an appropriate size. Just stunned by the rush of water and movement, not concussed. After a moment he shook his head vigorously looked around. "Wait, what happened? Where are we? Where's my father? Where's Leia? There was all this _water_ all of a sudden, and-"

"The temple activated some kind of defense mechanism. It washed us down into the lower levels." She closed her eyes a moment, concentrating. She could feel a little through the mental bond she was developing with Leia. But Leia had yet to develop the skill of communicating clearly through the bond, and her focus was elsewhere. Ahsoka wasn't going to get much information this way.

Then there were the tattered remnants of her mental bond with Anakin. If she reached out, really focused, she could probably...

No. Ahsoka wasn't ready to do that.

"Leia's alive," she said, "Your father is, too. They got washed into some other part of the temple. But we need to work on getting out of here."

Luke drew himself up, or tried to - he wasn't very tall, and was also floating underwater, so it didn't have much effect. "Getting out of here?! What about going and saving them? We've got to go get them, right?"

Ahsoka bit her lip, briefly overwhelmed by a rush of memory. Anakin Skywalker would have answered her like that - maybe with a bit more anger. Anakin had been all about saving people. If someone he loved was in danger, he dropped everything and fixed it, no matter the odds.

How a man like that could have become Darth Vader - from a rescuing hero to a demon of death - well. Even after all these years, even knowing Palpatine must have influenced him somehow, it was still beyond her understanding.

She took a deep breath, recentered herself, and let the feeling pass.

"Think of it this way," she told Luke. "All four of us are going to need a way out of here. We look for that first. If Leia and your father are still lost when we find that, we can look for them then, and we'll have a way better chance of actually leading them to safety when we find them."

Luke didn't argue further, which was another difference between him and his father. Just sighed. "Okay, but- if you feel anything in the Force-"

"I'll let you know," Ahsoka assured him. "Take off your cape."

"What?!"

He reminded her so much of his father that it made her heart ache. It wasn't even anything she could have explained to him - just little things, the tones of his voice, the way his face moved. There was something in that ache that made her wonder about him. Did he know why his father had fallen? Had Anakin told him the story? She wanted to ask.

She wanted to, but it wasn't fair to put a burden like that on a boy like him. It wasn't fair to make Luke account for his father's crimes, even if he was more or less on his father's side now.

"Take off your cape," she repeated. "As soon as it catches on something, you're going to strangle."

Luke reluctantly unclasped the cape and let it drift away in the current. She thought of chiding him to hold on to it, not to leave _litter_ in this ancient sacred site, but she thought better of it. They were trapped and in danger if they didn't find their way to the surface soon. and there wasn't a good way to carry things like this with them.

The fancy clothes, she thought, were unlike Luke's father. They were a taste he'd inherited from Padmé, maybe, or something the officials at the palace had gotten him into. Though the complete disregard for whether or not his clothes were appropriate for the situation, for whether or not he was prepared for what he'd just walked into - _that_ was like Anakin.

"Come on," Ahsoka said, and they both swam upward and outward.

*

"My father said you were his Padawan," said Luke as they swam. They'd found a corridor leading out of the upper level - hard to tell if it was the one they'd come in by, but it looked at least vaguely intact. He was surprised how dark the water was. The only source of light was Ahsoka's headlamp, which swung hypnotically back and forth with the movements of her head as she swam. Luke didn't really know this woman, but she seemed good to him. Anakin knew her, and - he only understood about half of what they'd just said to each other up there, before the water hit, but he _wanted_ to understand. "What's a Padawan?"

"A Padawan is a Jedi apprentice. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, Jedi younglings with promise would be selected by a Jedi Master and became that master's Padawan learner. If you were a Padawan, you would follow wherever your master went, even on the most dangerous missions. They'd train you in every skill they knew, until you were ready to face the Trials and become a Jedi Knight in your own right. It was a close relationship - like being family." She smiled slightly, bittersweetness creeping into her voice. "When I'd left the Order, when I didn't want to talk about exactly where I'd come from, I used to call him my big brother."

So what did that make Ahsoka to Luke, then? His Force- _aunt?_ Wow. Luke thought through how the rest of the aborted conversation in the upper room had gone. "And you're training Leia, but she's not your Padawan. Because you're not a master?"

Ahsoka kicked forward through the murky water, and Luke swam harder to catch up. Her lekku streamed out behind her gracefully, like little tails. "That's one of the reasons."

"And - my father said -" Luke frowned, trying to remember Anakin's exact words. Half of them hadn't made sense even at the time, as far as Luke was concerned. "That they kicked you out of the Order?"

Ahsoka abruptly went still.

Luke swam up beside her, chagrined. Here she was saving him from this creepy underwater ruin, and he was just poking her emotional sore spots. That wasn't the way to do things. "I'm sorry. You don't have to talk about it if you'd rather not. I just..."

"No, I should tell you. Before he tells you _his_ version. Who knows how garbled that will be after this many years of Dark Side." She hugged herself, looking off into the distance. "You have to understand that your father and I were in the Jedi Order in its last days. Palpatine already ran the Republic. And the Order was making mistakes, stupid, ugly mistakes, because that's what happens when someone's manipulated you into fighting a war for them and run you ragged on the battlefield and there's not enough left in you to think straight. I was framed for a crime that I didn't commit, and the Jedi kicked me out of the Order so I could be tried by the Republic military. It was a rigged trial, it shouldn't have been their jurisdiction - the whole thing was stupid. The Jedi offered to take me back after, even make me a Knight, but... I couldn't. I couldn't trust them again, not until it was too late."

"I'm sorry," said Luke. He only halfway understood this story, but he could feel the pain in it.

Ahsoka looked back at him with an odd, sad smile. "Anakin was the one who saved me. The Jedi couldn't find the real culprit, so he went and did it himself. Dragged her right into the courtroom. He was always like that. If someone was in trouble he'd wade into hell to get them out, no matter what anyone else said. He..." She looked down again, her face plunging back into shadow. "He never gave up on me."

Luke could hear the other, unspoken side to that story. He'd never given up on her, until he gave up on the whole Jedi Order's right to live. He'd never given up on her, but after what he became, she'd had to give up on him.

"He's changing," Luke blurted. "I've seen it."

"I know," said Ahsoka. She kicked off against the floor and started swimming again, more subdued than before. "Trust me, Luke. If he wasn't changing, you wouldn't be alive."

*

This was definitely not the time, Ahsoka thought, to be having emotional conversations like these. They needed to get to the surface before their air ran out. And before they ran into whatever was making this feeling of _wrongness_ that Ahsoka still felt, like a chill in her spine. She had hoped that this temple would hide an uncomplicated story, something happy, something where all the Sith had seen the errors of their ways and then they never troubled the Jedi again, but if that was all that had happened here, it wouldn't have felt like this.

If anything, as they continued on, it was getting stronger.

"Stay close to me," she ordered, as they turned the corner into another large chamber, one that might have been used for meetings or rituals. Seats lined the walls at varying levels like an amphitheatre, variously broken or intact. One artificial light still improbably functioned, bathing the room in an eerie, dim, luminescent blue.

There was a crack in the floor, less than a hands-breadth wide, and something immediately unnerved Ahsoka about it. She sensed, rather than saw, something dark coming up through that crack. An energy of sorts, something foul that had been placed in the room below, and activated recently, stretching itself up to meet them.

Ahsoka had seen Sith temples before - every once in a while an old Jedi temple would turn out to have Sith rooms still intact and in working order below it, festering like a blood blister under their Light Side cover. This didn't feel like that. It felt, not like a hidden source of Sith magic lying in wait under her feet, but like a single point of power that had been hidden in one of the Light Side's rooms. Like graffiti from Coruscant's lower levels, a signature left by some enterprising intruder long after the temple itself had fallen into disrepair.

But that didn't make it any less dangerous.

"Luke," she warned, "stay back," but Luke had already begun to swim forward, curious about this strangeness of this thing he sensed. Curious like any Padawan would be, when they hadn't been in the world long enough to know better.

She grabbed hold of him a second too late.

She saw the moment he was mentally sucked in to some vision, the energy of the room below reflecting darkly in his eyes. She reached for his mind and pulled, but his mind was _strong_ \- she'd forgotten to take into account how _strong_ a Skywalker's mind was in the Force, strong as Leia's, nearly as strong as his father's, even without formal training - and it was Ahsoka who found herself pulled along, instead.

*

She wasn't with Luke. Whatever he was seeing, he was seeing it alone. She was in a dark alley, a spaceship corridor, nondescript and rectangular and dim, its ends stretching out past the limits of vision. Someone was running to her down the corridor - she could hear it, but she couldn't see them yet. Someone was calling for help.

_My dear girl,_ said a voice in her head, and she raised her brows irately. Ahsoka was a grown-ass adult; in a few years, she'd be forty. Whoever this was, he sounded younger than her. And he was obviously a Dark Sider. _What do you seek?_

"Nothing _you_ could give me," she retorted.

_You are correct. You seek knowledge of the Jedi,_ said the voice. _But you already know what the Jedi are like._

Down the corridor, panting and gasping and stumbling, a pair of figures came into view.

It was Yoda and Mace Windu. Windu shouldn't have been alive, and Yoda shouldn't have been _here,_ but here they both were. Robes in tatters. Blood on their limbs. These had the strongest of all the Jedi, but their strength was running out. Only the Force, she judged, had kept the alive long enough to get this far.

"Ahsoka," he gasped, stumbling again, falling to his knees. "He's coming."

"Help us, you must."

"Who's coming?" Ahsoka rushed to them. "Who did this to you?"

Yoda had doubled over, shaking with pain. "Time - to explain - there is not."

"You're what's left of the Jedi Order," Wundu pressed. "Don't you see? You're all the Jedi now. The Force will be with you. If you can just... just stand your ground a little longer, just _help-_ "

But Ahsoka heard another set of heavy footsteps, coming up the corridor behind them. She knew those steps. She knew there was no help for this.

"No," she whispered, feeling a shiver up her spine, and both Jedi Masters looked up at her, contemptuous and wounded.

"Citizen," Windu barked, his breath growing more ragged, "you are _ordered_ to assist."

But the dark current dancing around Ahsoka's mind, the current that had come up through the crack in the floor, ordered something else. _Wanted_ something else. And it was a desire Ahsoka was all too familiar with.

The Jedi had done nothing to assist _her,_ not when she needed it as badly as they needed it now. The Empire had wanted to lock her away forever for something she didn't do, for _politics,_ and the Jedi had all just stood aside and let it happen. They'd disowned her. The Empire had risen, and former Padawans like her had scattered into the galaxy scared and in danger and alone. The few real Jedi who survived had done nothing for them. Yoda had flown off somewhere so secluded that no one could find him, only occasionally deigning to appear in someone's vision. Obi-Wan had taken Luke to Tatooine and then sat there in a cave for two decades, not even training Luke in the Force until it was almost too late. It had been people like Ahsoka, Padawans and exiles, not the real Jedi, who were brave enough to keep fighting against the Empire. And of all the former Padawans Ahsoka knew, she was the only one still living now.

She alone had been fighting for the forces of good all this time, and wasn't it just like the Jedi that they didn't even say thank you? They only asked her for _more._

She walked up to Windu and looked down at him as he crouched there.

"Could I have ever _commanded_ you," she asked softly, "to help me?"

"Of- of course you-" he spluttered.

But she knew it was a lie.

Ahsoka turned her back and began to walk away. She heard the footsteps behind her, the heavy mechanical breath, the _snap-hiss_ of the red saber. She knew exactly what fate she had left them to.

*

Ahsoka let out a long breath and pulled herself out of the vision.

This was Sith work, but it was rudimentary Sith work, not even all that tempting in the end. It had brought up nothing she hadn't already thought of, privately, on her worst and longest sleepless nights. Nothing she hadn't already held up to the light, and considered, and rejected.

The truth was that the Jedi had failed her. She knew that. And the other truth was that, when Ahsoka thought deeply about what she believed in, how she thought people ought to be, she thought of the Jedi. They had believed in the right things, even if their adherence to those beliefs was imperfect. She believed in those things, too. When she searched her feelings, she knew it.

There was so much in the universe that had gone wrong because of the Dark Side, so much more than her individual pain. So much that had to be made right. And no matter how much the Light Side asked of her so as to right those wrongs, no matter how unfair it might seem, Ahsoka knew, when she searched her feelings, that she wanted to answer its call.

She took another deep breath, and she let the vision melt away, slough off of her limbs like nothing but smoke. She opened her eyes. She was back in the underwater amphitheatre; not much time had passed. Luke was floating in front of her, an agonized, conflicted look on his face, still entranced.

Ahsoka reached out for him, bracing herself correctly this time for the sheer weight of his presence in the Force. This time, she pulled him back out.


End file.
